


What Is And What Should Never Be

by bluesyturtle



Series: You Know You’re My Desire [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Amputation, Awkward Conversations, Bad Flirting, Biting, Cannibalism, Canon Compliant, Canon Timeline, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Crack Treated Seriously, Crack and Angst, Deception, Dinosaurs, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Manipulation, Empathy, Engineering, First Meetings, First Time, Identity Reveal, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Marking, Mental Health Issues, Mild Language, Minor Original Character(s), Murder, Mutilation, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, Prison, Psychopaths In Love, Self-Harm, Topping from the Bottom, Walk Into A Bar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-02-08 14:37:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1944882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Randall Tier’s in a bar lamenting his relationship and lack thereof with Dr. Lecter when he happens to see a handsome stranger drinking away sorrows of his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What Is And What Should Never Be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justbreathe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justbreathe/gifts).



> _And if you say to me tomorrow, / Oh, what fun it all would be / Then what’s to stop us, pretty baby? / But What Is And What Should Never Be?_
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> What is the fire you draw to  
> when you clutch each other  
> between the sheets? What cold do  
> you fear? What drives you near  
> madness, the jealousy you daily  
> bear?  
> -Paula Meehan, “City: Hearth” from _Three Irish Poets—An Anthology_

Randall has some doubts about this bar. It’s kind of out of the way, and Dr. Lecter used to bring him here when they first got back in touch last year. He’s a bit pissed about it, actually. Lecter came into his life again like they were going to tear down the beautiful and recreate all sorts of brutish mayhem from the ashes, but some other butterfly had wandered into his path and wrecked it all before they ever took off.

Some other brilliant little freak had captivated him. Randall’s known Lecter since he was a kid now; he can’t pretend not to get it. He’s always going to be the wayward son—the child and never the man.

So fuck Hannibal Lecter. Or not, if that’s what he prefers. Fuck Will Graham since that’s apparently what everyone prefers.

At the bar he sits down heavily and has a beer, careless of the name brand or the temperature of the foul-smelling liquid in the glass bottle. Dr. Lecter always ordered wine when they came here. Randall thought it was pretentious. Wine smells just as bad to him as beer. It’s an acquired taste, sure. Murder’s a bit foul, too, and violence. He supposes he understands the soapbox people like to stand on.

Whatever. It’s all sights and sounds and furies. He downs his beer until his eyes burn and his head starts to swim.

When he sets it down there’s a new guy sitting at the end of the bar circling a dripping wet shot glass on the polished wood. It might earn him a sour look from the bartender on a regular night, but the usual guy who owns the place is out tonight. Some fresh-faced young kid is tending it in his place. She’s pretty, at least twenty-one but not much older than that, and doesn’t know the difference between bourbon and whiskey. None of the patrons get short with her. One man earlier started to, and a mean-looking guy at least twice his size got on him before anything could escalate. Randall’s fascinated with their relationship.

He’s a people-watcher at the best of times. It can’t be helped.

That’s how he knows that the new guy down the bar is upset. In the least, he’s disgruntled about something—maybe his girlfriend broke up with him or just asked him to choose between her and his best friend and he’s conflicted.

Randall’s less interested in the circumstances, admittedly. New guy is handsome, though the frown on his face is going to give him premature wrinkles sooner rather than later. It’s a non-issue. Randall works with dead things for a living and as a vocation, so he knows bodies and body types. New guy is built like a fully restored _Machairodus kabir_ , long limbs and robust joints obscured by living skin.

The pretty bartender gives him another beer that he didn’t ask for, winks at him, and saunters off. The bouncer guy who’s either her boyfriend or her brother—disturbing—glowers at him. They have the same very dark, even skin tone, so it seems likelier that they’d be related than dating, though sometimes like does attract like. Bouncer guy keeps staring at him like he’s just waiting for Randall to give him a reason. Randall takes his hostility as a sign to move.

He sits next to New guy. It’s not like he could have gone elsewhere, even though the bar isn’t overly crowded.

New guy tosses back the second half of the drink he’d been sipping and says, “Smart. Make him think you’re gay so he won’t beat you senseless for looking at his baby sister.”

“So she is his sister.”

New guy nods. “Gave me that spiel when I walked in—said his name was Leonard.” He chuckles. “I think it’s probably his real name. Anyway, saw him throwing someone out as I was getting in. Wasn’t pretty. Julie?”

New guy raises his glass, and Randall notes the peculiar way his voice changes when he calls the bartender over. It doesn’t drop or lilt or do any of the things people make their voices do when they’re trying to entice. The change in his voice is soft and unassuming. It’s polite without being obnoxious, respectful. Julie smiles at him and replaces his empty glass with a replenished one. Leonard doesn’t look their way.

“Thing about siblings is they’ve got many faces,” New guy says.

“You have any? Brothers or sisters?”

“I had a brother, older.”

Randall palms his beer. The condensation sticks to his skin and cools his wrist when he slides it over the glass. “Sorry,” he offers, when the flat silence starts to ring like a whistle blowing in his ears.

“I’m Matthew.”

“Randall.”

The hand extended to him comes at a blank moment in between two crucial thoughts he’s having one after the other; the first being that Matthew is a biblical name, and the second being that this bar is the equivalent of a reject bin for old car parts. It’s a damn shame, he thinks, as he gives Matthew his wet hand to shake—which he does because he’s considering philosophy up in his head rather than in his seat where he should be, taking notes.

He does note the feel and aesthetics of the hand squeezing his: roughened knuckles, slender fingers, and one bluish vein standing out against the pale sheath of skin winding up around his wrist from the back of his hand. His grip is strong and firm. The drinks haven’t impaired his capacity for strength or sturdiness just yet. Randall wonders distantly how many he’d need in his system to have that kind of effect. He’s a tall guy, muscled, and he’s been pacing himself reasonably enough. The night is young. It’s dark outside, but the morning’s some hours away.

“What about you?” Matthew asks, unfazed by the transfer of water on his hand or by Randall’s self-imposed disorientation. “Only child?”

“Sister.” He shakes his head. “Two, actually.”

“Older or younger?”

“They’re both older.”

“So we’re both the babies in our families.” Matthew grins, and the tilt of it on his face is charmingly lopsided. 

“I guess so.”

Matthew drinks his second shot, all of it down the hatch in one go. “What was her name?”

“My sister?” Randall frowns, recalling that he specifically said he had two.

“The girl who dumped you.” Matthew says without saying _no_. “It’s written all over your face.”

Plainly, Randall answers, “Wasn’t a girl. I didn’t get dumped.” He drinks his beer and sets it down on the bar, loud enough that the sound draws Leonard’s eyes again. Randall sits up straighter on his backless stool and sighs, frowning at Matthew’s knowing look that doesn’t come with a smile but rather half a smirk.

As if he’s surprised Matthew says, too innocently, “He’s actually a pleasant guy.”

“You said he threatened you at the door.”

“Not what I said.” Matthew shakes his head. “I said he threw a guy out as I was coming in. You didn’t even ask why. A deficit in curiosity is such a sad thing in this day and age.”

Randall rolls his eyes. “Julie’s pretty, young, and friendly. Leonard throws a guy out while you’re walking in, and the only explanation he gives is that he’s her brother. You don’t need to be curious about what you already know.”

He takes the shot Julie pours for Matthew and tosses it back. Matthew smiles peacefully at Julie’s bemused expression and nods, in suspiciously good spirits. When she leaves he steers the topic away from the bartender siblings and back to Randall, which is just great. “So, not a girl, and you didn’t get dumped.”

Randall scowls and Matthew just exudes pleasantness. It’s disarming. Or it would be if Randall were drunk or at least getting there. He wants to be drunk. He wants for this encounter to be going better than it is by his count. Julie comes over when he holds his hand up and gives him a shot of something that isn’t the same as what Matthew was drinking. It has a different kind of bite to it. He thinks it might be Tequila.

“Not a girl, and I didn’t get dumped,” Randall confirms for him, without saying, _no._

“A man then.” And Matthew’s voice does drop, does lilt, does entice, or at least aims to entice.

But he doesn’t look like he’s trying, and maybe that’s what sells it to Randall in the first place. He isn’t good at this. His tendencies lean toward savagery and bodily collisions or nothing at all. Matthew’s shoulder droops lazily, does something sexy to the swoop of his clavicle that Randall can see jutting up from underneath the collar of his shirt.

Randall swallows and lists off the various components of a bear’s skull in his mind, plows through the molars, the premolars, the canine, and incisors, and blinks his eyes shut when he gets to the maxilla. It’s a trick he learned as an intern, imagining his hand sliding along the smooth bone when he couldn’t touch for real or when the gloves couldn’t come off.

_Orbital, parietal, auditory bulla, articular process, coronoid…_

And then there’s a hand sliding across the back of his neck, a reverse image of the calm settled inside and just an inch lower than where he’d left off—but on the outside. He recognizes the rough-smooth slide of Matthew’s fingers. They’re not soft like Hannibal’s hands are soft. Matthew uses his hands, just like Randall uses his hands.

Except Randall’s aren’t rough from his work so much as from contact sports and mountain hikes. And Lecter’s are only smooth because he wears gloves when he _really_ works.

“Shouldn’t mix your liquor, Randall.” His voice has stopped lilting and drawling the way Randall could have relaxed into liking, maybe, if he had another drink in him. Matthew’s voice has shifted into a delicate thing, the way it did when he called Julie over before. Randall doesn’t need special treatment from him, from this stranger with his dead brother and his personality and his issues. Oblivious to Randall’s internal monologue, Matthew murmurs, “It’s not a race.”

“It is. We’re here because we lost.” He gropes for his beer and drains it in a few big swallows that twist the corners of his mouth into a sour grimace. Beer’s the worst. He catches his breath and pinches the bridge of his nose until the pounding in his head stops. “Or are you going to tell me you weren’t dumped either?”

“I wasn’t dumped.” Randall levels him with an unimpressed, watered down glare. Matthew shrugs, nothing in his face changing. “I just wasn’t wanted in the first place.”

“You’re awfully calm about that.”

“There’s something I can do to change it.” Matthew’s eyes slide away from Randall’s, considering the possibility. They sparkle deviously and rove back slowly to meet Randall’s bemused scowl. His fingers are still pressed gently against the back of Randall’s neck. It’s not uncomfortable, but Randall can’t make himself forget about the light pressure, the mere presence of a touch on him—his almost instinctual alertness. The tension is just as commonplace as Matthew’s natural ease of movement and interaction. Matthew muses, lips quirking at one side, “He gave me an assignment.”

“Well, he sounds like a winner.”

“You sound like you’re _accustomed_ to winning.”

Randall’s eyes skate away, growing queasily flummoxed at the lazy grace of the lion next to him. That’s so clearly what this is. Matthew is what Randall can only become when his hands are replaced by claws and when his face is obscured by a deadly jaw. He’s the civilized, upright beast, relaxed and languid and composed. And Randall is agitated, blinking, and dizzy. The suit is only something he can don for appearances right now, only for himself. It doesn’t work yet; it’s incomplete. Randall is incomplete without it.

God, he’s an insect.

_Not an insect. An animal._

_An unfathomable monster, the greatest predator that will ever run the fields of this earth. Once the suit is ready. Once the parts come together. Once I can…_

Matthew squeezes the back of his neck, waking him up and bringing him back. Randall opens his eyes and grunts when Matthew squeezes at his neck again, a harder nudge into the strained muscle. “Easy,” Matthew tells him.

This should be easy. Matthew’s making it so easy for him.

He couldn’t be peacocking more obviously for this guy, this verbally stunted barfly, this Randall with his eye for people and his quiet disposition. There’s some kind of pathology to him, some kind of abnormality toward which he keeps leaning. It’s a refuge for him because it takes him away from the present moment. Matthew can see it; he can track its progression from helpful distraction to full, immersive check-out. Randall’s a flight risk, but it’s okay.

Matthew’s got his contract—that’s what he’s calling it because it makes him feel like an international spy—that he’s going to act on sometime before the end of the week. He thinks probably Saturday. It’s as good a day to kill or be killed as any. So as kind of a last hurrah before stalking the big game, Dr. Lecter, he wants a night, in case there aren’t any others left for him afterward. Matthew’s a long list of things; cocky is up there at the top. All the same, he observes happenstance and fate and superstition and the most basic underpinnings of fear that encourage caution and patience where he might otherwise rush in half-cocked. There’s a chance he goes in for the kill and the tables turn on him. Of course there’s a chance of it, even if he doesn’t believe it’ll happen that way.

Randall hasn’t given him much time outside of his occasional blank moments to calculate, but Matthew recognizes his mild catatonia after the first flicker of a spell. He’s probably not schizophrenic, but it’s still not the most stable of behavior patterns to slip into. Matthew spends a lot of time around lunatics, and well, it takes one to know one, doesn’t it? Although he looks like he’s trying not to be, the guy’s at least unhinged.

So Matthew kneads at Randall’s neck and waits for him to get ahold of himself. It doesn’t take long. For someone who couldn’t detect a wandering mind so easily, Matthew doesn’t think it’d be so obvious, this thing going on with barfly Randall. He’s discreet enough about it. Mostly he just looks nervous, at the most maybe flustered with drink or emotion. But Matthew’s pretty good at spotting inconsistencies in a person’s demeanor by now. He prides himself on it, in fact. Even if Will Graham hadn’t left bodies in his wake, Matthew’s certain he’d know him just by looking at him—that he’d know Graham is exactly what the FBI so badly wants to prove that he is.

Randall looks up, recalibrating, and his eyes happen to land on Julie, where they linger. She is beautiful, even if Matthew did come here tonight looking for a man to take home. Leonard’s reading at his end of the bar, the same title Matthew clocked on his way to the restroom earlier: Nella Larsen’s _Passing_. He’s still working on a tall glass of water with a lemon gutted over the rim.

Matthew leans in and brushes his lips against Randall’s cheek. “You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

Twisting slightly in his seat, Randall raises one eyebrow at him, the curve of expression drastically contrasting with the dimness of his eyes. He says, a carefully worded warning, “You’re going to get _us_ in trouble.”

“Nah, Julie likes me. Leonard will protect us if trouble comes.”

_I’ll eviscerate anyone who wants to **make**_ trouble, he doesn’t say.

He’s currently unarmed for legal and practical reasons, but it doesn’t mean he couldn’t do it later. He’s stalked plenty of big animals before. It’s easy pickings in places like these. People lose their wallets all the time and drive off slowly with their license plates dragging after them in plain view. Matthew doesn’t say it, but he catches Randall staring at him, giving him an open, assessing look like he understands something. He has an intrigued expression on his face like he knows where Matthew just went, as if their distraction spaces could be anything alike—

Matthew takes his hand away, and shivers just a bit when Randall’s eyes dart to the side and follow his hand as it drops into his lap. Randall licks his lips, just a quick, probably unintentional darting out of his tongue, and looks back up at Matthew. Belatedly, Matthew gets a look at him, one that sticks so he can process what he sees.

Randall’s features are simple but polished. The blue rings chaining his black, black pupils into tight, perfect circles are electric in color if not with vitality. His cheeks are neither sunken nor full, his eyebrows are neatly, naturally curved and light brown, not bushy or sparse, and his lips are full and a peachy, ruddy pink. Overall he’s moderately pleasant to look at—above average certainly but not stunning or incomparably lovely. Probably he could use a shave, but the stubble blossoming down his neck is even, maintained. Matthew would like to feel it against his chin. He rubs at his own jaw, the skin there shaven but not entirely smooth.

Yeah, he could go to bed with Randall. Hell, he’d like to.

But it’s not crackling or intense between them. They both want it to be, maybe, but they don’t run that way just in strict operational terms of mechanics and psychology. Matthew can tell that’s what this is, that there’s a fissure separating Matthew Brown from the modestly handsome Randall who’s studying him intently like something about Matthew has just become infinitely interesting to him. It’s how Matthew looks at Will Graham, so it’s a curious thing. It’s a very, very curious thing.

Because even with Will Graham, it’s not a matter of physical attraction. It’s a matter of wanting someone to connect with him, wanting someone who can match him and teach him and grow with him. It’s a fanatical, sacrificial kind of thing, but it isn’t frenzied or lustful or desirous in the way he’d love for it to be. Neither is this thing with Randall. That said, he doesn’t want to leave this here. He doesn’t want to call it quits just because they’re not pawing at each other and attempting desperately to climb through skin into blood and bone.

He doesn’t think Randall really wants that anyway. And besides, it’s more than what Matthew’s really prepared to sign over in a night, especially with his prospects lining up the way they presently are. If they were talking about killing, well, it’d be different. Wouldn’t it? Skin and blood and bone, just not his and not Randall’s either.

Ironically, that’d be the safer option. It’s only because he can’t get caught now for murdering some random barfly when the trophy kill is just a few days out that he cares at all about Randall’s safety. 

“Let’s get out of here,” Randall says, surprising him, slightly. His voice is as flat as it’s been.

Matthew grins because he’s kind of grown to appreciate it, so sue him. “Why?”

Randall shrugs, eyes not flicking away from Matthew’s for a second. Eye contact isn’t his weakness, obviously. Communication isn’t the problem. It’s just the connection. He’s drifting because he’s not anchored in like Matthew can pretend to be most of the time. Maybe he wants to be bound like Matthew does. Maybe it doesn’t frighten him like it sometimes tries to frighten Matthew.

“I’ve been dumped, and you’ve been rejected. We’re pathetic.”

“And this is a reason to take you home with me, is it?” Matthew’s smiling.

He only had the two shots, and he took his time with them, so it’s not a tipsy kind of warmth sloshing in his system. Randall’s just quaint—something about him is endearing for the eccentricity attached to him. There are times when he can’t picture him as a brother, but when he thinks about it he’s not surprised he would have grown up with sisters.

It’s psychology intersecting with history. Randall’s a bunch of things that don’t make sense and a few other things that make a _lot_ of sense, and Matthew wants the answers. He wants all of them.

Like for starters, Matthew wants to know who dumped him. He can’t even rationalize why, but that intimate kind of knowledge aches in him like a craving. It’s really not fair to ride it like a power trip since they’re technically the losers in their respective interpersonal endeavors, but the thought persists. The craving persists. Randall’s just looking at him, placidly unbothered and simmering vaguely with hostility. Matthew likes that, too, for whatever reason. Okay, so it’s not surprising at all that he does.

Matthew scoffs, noting with a fuzzy sort of wonder, “You want to be pathetic together?”

“I’m not accustomed to winning. I’ve won _and_ lost. Sometimes it mattered, and sometimes it meant nothing at all,” Randall says coolly, instead of _yes_. “I’m _accustomed_ to letting it be, whether it’s supposed to feel good or whether it’s supposed to hurt.”

“And this time you don’t want to let it be,” Matthew supplies gently when Randall doesn’t.

“It just is, and what I want is not to think about it for a while.”

“Well,” Matthew says slowly, interested but not to the point of dragging Randall out of the bar by his collar, “I could maybe manage that.”

“ _Maybe_ you could?” Randall smirks like he wants to laugh but doesn’t have the energy to go that far. It does a lovely, oddly relatable thing to his face. Instantly it takes the ice out of his expression, and Matthew wants to melt at the sight of it fading away so offhandedly.

Matthew likes the possibilities he can envision with the occurrence of this sole chink in the apathetic armor with which Randall clothes himself. “Tell me you want me to.”

“I do,” he answers easily enough without flinching or stammering or hesitating for even a second. He’s a statue—not a mote of warmth to him.

Matthew leans in, hungry to adulate if it’ll get that stony expression to crumble and the steely eyes to cloud over. He’ ravenous for _that_ ; he likes fragmentation and the small, delicious trauma born on either side of it. “And when we get there, then what?”

Randall shrugs, eyes flicking in between Matthew’s eyes just once like a slowly swinging pendulum. “Anything, nothing. Whatever you want.”

“Dangerous thing to offer,” Matthew warns, polishing off the last of Randall’s beer and politely waving Julie off when she comes to give him another. “You don’t know the kind of things I like.”

Coolly assessing him, Randall asks, “Do you like me?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“That’s all that matters then.”

Matthew smiles, and Randall stands like the confirmation alone is enough to convince him. At first he teeters unsteadily, but he evens out before managing to do anything too drunk, like fall over. On his feet Randall looks very tall but also attractively lissome. There’s a haziness to his edges that’s very attractive as it makes the glazed sheen in his eyes look more like it belongs there. His fingers splay out on the polished wood, and Matthew looks up at him, unconsciously baring his throat and slowly becoming aware of it the longer Randall stares at him with that peculiar half-glint lending a spark to his eyes.

_There’s something dead about you,_ he nearly says. Instead he holds his tongue and stands, too. He throws some money onto the counter for both their drinks and angles his head to the door. Julie grins at him on his way out, and Leonard nods once solemnly. Matthew just nods back, not knowing how else to receive him. Randall leads the way out of the bar.

“I can’t drive,” he informs Matthew once they’re out in the open night air.

“I walked here.” Matthew shrugs. “I probably shouldn’t drive either.”

“Looks like we’re going to yours then.”

Matthew watches his companion for a few short seconds, thoughtful and curious. He just says, “Okay.”

But they don’t go anywhere. Randall’s looking at him for directions, literally, and Matthew has something else on his mind. He reaches for Randall’s shirt, the fabric bunching up under his fingers as he pulls him toward the wall. “Just need to see,” he mumbles, tugging Randall hard enough that he stumbles into him and has to brace his hand on the wall over Matthew’s shoulder.

There’s a fast awkward moment of indecision where Matthew’s holding Randall close and he thinks he’ll have to explain what he wants and talk circles around it. But Randall’s looking at him already and seeing just what he needs to see—just what he wants to try before they embark on a journey for Matthew’s apartment.

And maybe it’s just situational or a self-fulfilling prophecy, but Matthew’s stomach drops. There’s a hot coal there deep in his gut and radiating waves of heat into the rest of his body. His arm slides around the back of Randall’s neck and pulls him in closer, edging his legs apart so Randall can step between them and bend into the kiss that _does_ melt Matthew from the inside out. Randall’s lips are soft against his and give just a bit when he pushes back. His hands snake around Matthew’s waist and grip against his ribs, encouraging him to arch his back so his front presses up hard into Randall’s chest.

His mouth falls open at the gentle tap of warm tongue to his bottom lip, but Randall doesn’t push. They stay there, both of them breathing harder and blinking rapidly.

“Did I pass?” Randall mumbles into Matthew’s upper lip.

Matthew laughs, breathless still. “You need to ask?”

They peel themselves off the wall and each other and find the sidewalk. Randall’s stride is even, measured. The drinks have started to quit him, or their stronger influence has, at least. He doesn’t ask how far a walk it is to Matthew’s place. They just walk together, patient and comfortable with waiting out the trip. Randall keeps his hands in his pockets. Matthew doesn’t try to touch him either. There’s no need or desire to act on impulse until they’ve got walls around them and a flat surface to grind on.

For the first ten minutes they’re both quiet. Matthew doesn’t feel anything frantic or jumpy about the things they don’t say. There’s nothing biting at him that wants to be actualized in words, and every time he looks over at Randall just to make sure he’s still with him, he looks remarkably undisturbed. As they’re crossing Aliceanna Street much later, Matthew asks what Randall does for a living. After about twenty minutes without conversation, it feels like a big step. He likes that there’s _some_ emotion attached to it.

“Museum restoration. Animal skeletons.”

“So you know your way around a stripped body.” Matthew winks at Randall’s bland look. “I’m an orderly at a mental hospital.” In Randall’s same tone of voice he adds, “For the criminally insane.”

Randall smiles, barely there but prominent enough, he thinks, for Matthew to see it if he looks for it, which he does. “So you know your way around a psychopath. We almost home?”

“Yeah, nearly there. Just up ahead a ways.”

“You’re near the water,” Randall observes, turning his head to look in the direction of the oceanic ambience filling up the otherwise quiet night. They’re right on the Patapsco, or maybe the Choptank. He’s less informed where rivers are concerned. Wooded areas and mountainous terrains are more his forte. He can intuit where there will be breaks in the foliage for him to crouch or jump through, and when he runs he welcomes the lash of reaching branches against his face, catching in his hair, dragging down his arms…

Randall can’t swim, so his territory has always been the ground. He’s always been a runner, a climber, a jumper, and a good offensive player in a rugby match, no matter how big the other guys are.

“I like the sound of it at night, when the traffic dies down and it’s just the breeze and the waves,” Matthew tells him, fishing a large Karabiner clip out of his pocket. There are four keys on the metal ring and no key chains or decorative flourishes alongside them. The keys all look alike to Randall from his vantage point. “Can’t really swim in it around these parts, though, so that’s unfortunate.”

“You don’t strike me as the type to follow rules you don’t agree with.”

Matthew gives him a wicked smirk and twirls the Karabiner clip on his finger. “You can’t prove anything,” he murmurs, striding around in front of him for the stairs of a very clean, stylish apartment complex. It doesn’t look like him, is the first thought Randall has. The inside of the apartment _does_ look like Matthew.

It isn’t dirty, but it’s messier than Randall’s place—a relaxed sort of disarray to it that isn’t a stamp of sloth so much as it is indicative of someone living in the space and being comfortable within it. Matthew’s leaning, confident strut is very at home within the spacious halls, and he looks good draped in moonbeams—sort of ghostly and dauntingly beautiful like a demigod, which is something that Randall is not ever going to tell him.

“You want something to drink?”

Randall walks to the mouth of the kitchen where Matthew’s opening a cabinet over the sink. “Are you drinking?”

“I’m doing whatever you want me to do,” Matthew answers easily, implying everything and nothing. He drops his hands, leaving the cabinet open overhead. “I don’t think you like drinking.”

“I like the excuse not to feel anything,” Randall counters. He comes forward and sets his hands on Matthew’s hips because he can, so why wouldn’t he?

Matthew hums. “Water, ginger ale?”

Randall shakes his head and pulls Matthew close. “No.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I do,” Randall murmurs, pushing Matthew up against the edge of the counter. He appreciates the double meaning, though it’s an inside joke he can’t really share with Matthew, or with anyone.

Randall leans in and kisses him, easily one of his new favorite things to do. He’s got a talented tongue that Randall likes best in his mouth. Matthew chuckles darkly against Randall’s cheek like he can tell just how much he likes kissing him. He slips his hands under Randall’s shirt and roves up his stomach then around his back with both of them. They’re cold from their long walk outside.

“What’s his name?” he hears over the sound of his back rushing back into the door to Matthew’s bedroom. It’s growled, and the sound makes Randall’s skin tingle.

“He’s my old therapist,” he manages once Matthew’s lips leave his and start to explore his neck. His tongue flicks at Randall’s fluttering pulse, the soft touch preceding a sharp bite that punches a rough groan out of Randall’s throat. He manages to kick off his shoes before Matthew starts walking him back into the sparsely moonlit room.

“Didn’t ask who he is,” Matthew says, pushing Randall down onto the bed. “I asked for his name.”

That he did. Randall squirms a bit on his back, throwing his arms up when Matthew moves to take his shirt. It’s as he’s returning the favor for Matthew—when he can’t ravage him with his hands or mouth and cause him to speak the name on a moan—that he says, “Hannibal.”

And Matthew stops, the shirt hanging at the end of one wrist like a flag and his eyebrows furrowing in a way they haven’t since they met. “Not Hannibal _Lecter?”_

Randall sits up, his expression doing something that mirrors Matthew’s pretty closely. “Yeah, that’s him.”

“Jesus,” Matthew sighs, scooting back and sitting back on his heels. He rubs his hand across his forehead. “Well, this is awkward.”

Randall rolls his eyes. It’s a good thing he’s not shy about his body, or this would be awkward. “Speak for yourself.”

For a few seconds Matthew just stares at Randall like he’s just noticed something phenomenal about his eyes or an equally puzzling question in his face. Matthew blinks, and in the dark his eyes look gray like stones. Breathless but not in the same way that he was when Randall kissed him outside the Annabel Lee Tavern, he says, “He dumped you for Will Graham, didn’t he?”

Careful not to move, Randall says, “Yeah, he did.”

Matthew nods and turns to sit so his knees hang over the side of the bed. He rubs at his face again, with both hands this time. Randall sits up and watches him, perfectly bewildered. After a few prolapsed seconds of stunned realization, Matthew laughs.

And laughs.

“Well, you’re better off for it,” he says, dabbing the corner of his eye with one knuckle. “He’s not what you think.”

Evenly, wondering what Matthew thinks he knows about Dr. Lecter, he murmurs, “Oh, isn’t he?”

But something about his tone catches Matthew’s attention and sobers him up because he looks up at him and something warm like understanding seeps into his features. Sympathy looks handsome on his face; it makes him appear older and younger in a number of fascinating, contradictory ways.

“Well, aren’t you full of surprises,” he all but hums, voice buzzing in his chest on its way out, tangibly enough that Randall can feel the vibration under his skin. It’s kinetic. Matthew knows. He _knows_.

“Are you going to tell me how you know about my doctor? Or are you going to leave me to have a revelation of my own?” Randall asks him, curious but not desperate for an answer. He’s content to sit or be thrown out as Matthew desires. The only thing he doesn’t want is to lie down and treat this conversation like foreplay. It’d be sophomoric, and that’s putting it lightly.

“I told you why I was in that bar tonight, didn’t I?”

Randall frowns and continues to frown. “Yeah, so?”

“It’s Will Graham. He’s the guy.”

They stare at each other. A car drives by outside, throwing headlights into the room and carrying the sound of tires on asphalt. The noise drifts off into the darkness. “Of course he is,” Randall drawls, standing to his feet and snatching his shirt up off the floor. “Golden boy—everybody’s favorite fucking psychopath.”

“Where are you going?” Matthew stands but doesn’t follow Randall into the hallway. “I don’t know if you heard me before, but we’re not exactly in bed together.”

“Difficult to be in bed with a prisoner—” Randall stops and turns to give him a scrutinizing look. He’d said before what kind of hospital he worked at, and Randall hadn’t even put two and two together. “Oh, but that’s right. He’s in your hospital, isn’t he? That how you met?”

“At least I didn’t meet him in therapy,” Matthew says without heat, stopping Randall at the door as he’s getting his shoes back on his feet. His shirt’s already on; Matthew’s, too, though he left his shoes in the bedroom. “What are you all worked up for?”

“I’m not worked up. Get out of my way.”

Matthew has an amazed expression on his face. “You are.”

Randall is, so he stops. He gets the wall up behind his back and stops, dropping the one shoe in his hand to the floor and burying that hand in his hair.

A mirthless laugh bubbles up from his throat and he trudges into the kitchen, his one shoe thudding against the tile with every other heavy step. He goes digging through the cabinets, starting with the one Matthew left open. There’s tequila and tumblers, so he takes down the bottle and a glass for himself.

After he’s swallowed down two very big doses of alcohol and his throat clears enough for him to speak, he grits out, “What’s the mission?”

Matthew stops him from filling the third one up and drinks what he’s already poured. “He wants me to kill your mutual friend, Dr. Lecter.”

Randall takes the shot glass back. “Oh.”

“That doesn’t surprise you.”

“Not really,” Randall mutters. “You’re charming, manipulative, and focused on getting just what you want how you want it. You’re _at least_ a sociopath.”

“That’s an outdated term, actually,” Matthew corrects him, taking this shot from him, too, and drinking it. “Hasn’t been used by any respected psychiatrist since 1968.”

“Wow, I just want to go to bed with you for your vast intellect,” Randall drones, snatching the shot glass back and staring briefly at Matthew’s Adam’s apple when he swallows and then his lips when he presses them together to blow out a quick sigh. He pours another full tumbler and stares at it, stomach turning at the telltale odor of liquor in his nose.

“I have many talents.” Matthew shrugs, dropping his hands behind him onto the edge of counter. “What about you?”

He’s asking if Randall’s like them—if he’s like Dr. Lecter, like Will Graham, like Matthew. “I’m not like anyone,” he says instead of _yes_.

But Matthew laughs, good nature shining through as it was wont to once the tension went out of the room. “What does that mean?”

“I haven’t killed anyone.”

There’s a stalled moment, and then Matthew asks, “No?”

_I know it’s what I need to do,_ he thinks to say. _I just have to become, first._

Instead he goes with, “No.”

“Well, that makes you like a lot of people.”

“A lot of people you know have hydraulic animal suits in their basements?”

Matthew looks at him. “No, that they don’t. I knew I sensed something primal about you. What do you mean hydraulic?”

“Prehistoric animal skeletons, weaponized.”

“The suit makes the man, I’ve heard,” Matthew remarks with his eyebrows raised high near his forehead. Randall can feel that his face betrays the bizarre hope the statement gives him; Matthew’s face in turn betrays a quiet kind of awe. “What’s stopping you?”

“It’s not finished yet.”

They stand for a while, and Randall drinks the Tequila he poured for himself. It knocks the breath out of him. He needs to sit down.

“Tough break,” Matthew says softly like he gets it. Maybe he does.

Randall shrugs like he doesn’t. “Not for much longer.”

The smile on Matthew’s face is an open, bewildered question, but he doesn’t say anything.

“You shouldn’t go after him.”

“No?” Matthew waits, but Randall holds his ground and does nothing else. “Why not?”

“He won’t let you kill him.”

“You say that like you know he won’t.”

“Because he won’t,” Randall tells him, skin prickling with drink and with slow-boiling agitation trying to be acknowledged. “Will Graham knows he won’t.”

Matthew sighs and extracts the tumbler from Randall’s fingers. He sets the bottle where it goes in the cabinet and washes the glass in the sink. When he’s done he comes back to stand beside Randall and says, “I killed Andrew Sykes for him already.”

“That’s cute,” Randall says irately. “Dr. Lecter isn’t just some guy off the street.”

Matthew shrugs. “You’re exactly the person I expect to say that.”

Incensed at the dismissal, Randall growls, “I’m the only person who’s _going_ to say that. Do you think he makes a habit of letting everyone he meets know how dangerous he is? You think he’d be an easy kill because that’s precisely what he _wants_ you to think. Do not ever make the mistake of thinking that you know something he doesn’t already plan for you to know. When you underestimate him, he kills you.”

“What does it matter to you if I do this?” Matthew asks, perfectly embodying what Randall’s observed in children—bold, unflinching honesty and curiosity.

_Because then Will Graham takes you both away from me,_ he can’t say.

“Even animals behave according to a food chain—there’s an established hierarchy in place, and it doesn’t allow for upward mobility.”

With his eyes unfocused, Matthew murmurs almost under his breath, “Hawks and ordinary birds.”

Trust him to walk into a bar and bring home the one guy who’d sooner have a long, tedious argument with him about _Hannibal Lecter_ of all people rather than rough him up a bit in bed. That’s why he stuck with Randall; he thought he’d be beastly underneath his complacent reserve and pervasive rigidity. Well, he was right about _beastly_ but in the wrong sense of the word. He hasn’t decided yet if that could actually be a good thing. It’s never happened to him before. He thought he’d gotten lucky letting himself fall into obsession with Will Graham after claiming him for dusty, beautiful idol.

But here he’d accidentally brought home a not-serial killer with all the makings of a monster. Matthew’s spellbound.

He doesn’t want to talk about Lecter—doesn’t even want to talk about Will Graham. Clasping his fingers loosely on Randall’s elbow, he leads him out of the kitchen into the living room. Matthew pushes him down onto the couch and takes it upon himself to straddle his lap.

It isn’t even sexual. Randall doesn’t register it as having that kind of connotation either. His hands gravitate organically to the backs of Matthew’s thighs and hold, but there’s no heat to it, no intention. Matthew just wants to look at him, wants to trap and to _be_ trapped. He wants to be the hunter as well the results of the hunt. The way Randall tells it, he’ll need to expect more of the same if he follows through with his plans to take Lecter out.

He strikes it from his mind. It’s irrelevant.

“So’d you go into museum restoration so you could make the suit, or are you making the suit because you went into museum restoration?”

“Neither.”

“Why then?”

Randall sighs quietly, fingers twitching against Matthew’s legs. He looks off to the side and says, lowly and almost like he’s reading the words, “I went into museum restoration because extinction fascinates me just as much as evolution does, and because paleontology is a window into the past just like the light from the stars is a window into the past.”

Matthew blinks at him.

“I’m building the suit because this skin is wrong.”

“Seems to fit you well enough,” Matthew offers gently. He straightens up at the hard look that falls over Randall’s face like a shadow. Randall doesn’t move to buck Matthew off his lap, so he stays where he is, his instinct for fear rumbling like thunder behind a curtain of heavy rainclouds. When the threat wanes he offers of himself, “I became an orderly so I could adopt their camouflage—the staff, not the patients.” He tips his head and adds, “Although some of our patients are exceptionally gifted, intellectually speaking.”

Randall rolls his eyes, but Matthew clarifies, “You know who Abel Gideon is, right?”

“Yeah, he’s the guy who carved up your boss. Graham shot him.”

Matthew nods. “He’s one of a few gems we’ve got buried in that hell hole of a prison.”

“Who else?” Randall drops his eyes, testing the give of Matthew’s hips with his fingers.

Matthew chuckles. “Well, Gideon. This other _astonishingly_ eloquent gentleman who goes by the name Vogt.” He rolls his hips once when Randall slides his knees up and causes Matthew’s body to slant more roughly into his. “Don’t get me started on the women’s ward.”

A breathy noise like a scoff jumps out of Randall’s mouth, parting his lips and opening him up for a kiss that Matthew takes greedily. Breath washing over Matthew’s mouth, he asks, “Who do you have in the women’s ward?”

Their noses brush together, and it feels good, but it’s impersonal. Matthew doesn’t think he would have it any other way. “Violent, cunning geniuses that could probably take over the world if they joined forces.”

Randall laughs, a quiet, diffidently humble sound. Nothing Randall does is indulgent. Matthew wishes, just a little bit, that he could see him in his “weaponized, hydraulic” suit. He has a thought to push his other responsibilities to a later date so that he _can_ see it—so that he can have time to let this thing grow and flourish. It’s rare enough that he knows about it at all, but he’d like the opportunity to _deserve_ the privilege of seeing it, in person.

That’s intimacy that he just can’t afford. He doesn’t believe Randall would let him have it, nor should he—certainly not for cheap.

“No chance of that happening in the men’s ward?”

“They’re all in it for themselves. No ambition.” He doesn’t mention Will Graham’s consistent manipulations of Abel Gideon. “They get locked up, and they resign themselves to it, most of them. Some of the women do, too, yeah, but the few rebellious patients we have break the mold and reshape the standards we set for everyone else.”

“Did you learn that watching your coworkers?”

“I learned that watching the inmates.”

“Impressive,” Randall murmurs, not sounding impressed in the slightest.

He leans in and kisses Matthew’s neck, and Matthew _loves_ it when he takes the initiative and touches him first. For all that he gives off a frigid vibe, the word is not a fitting descriptor of the warm body or the hot mouth or the wandering hands on Matthew’s skin, touching him through his clothes, dragging across his scalp.

“I’ve had a lot to drink tonight,” Randall warns him when Matthew grinds down on him, sounding more inebriated than he has all night. A surprised moan falls from his swollen, red lips when Matthew does it again. “I’m serious,” he slurs, “I probably can’t fuck you.”

“Don’t want to fuck you,” Matthew mumbles into the dip between his jaw and his ear. “Just want to touch.”

He’s kept up with Randall perfectly tonight, shot for shot and swig for swig—Randall _probably_ had more of the beer than he did—so he’s pretty much matched for drunken impotency, unfortunately.

“Wait,” Matthew giggles, leaning back to look at Randall and staring more fuzzily when he gets an eyeful of his mussed hair and his sleepily blinking eyes. “Did you want to top tonight?”

“Did _you?_ ”

“I don’t know.” Matthew shrugs, grinning around the burn in his cheeks. “I guess I thought about it.”

“Did you think about bottoming?”

Drunk or not, Matthew’s stomach flips. He says, “Yes.”

And he imagines it for a few seconds more now that he’s got Randall beneath him with his heat and his human skin that he’d trade permanently for animal pelt if he could. He sees himself straddling Randall just like he is now except with much fewer clothes between them and with Randall’s cock in his ass—

“Not sure I’d let you top,” Randall murmurs. His hands roam haphazardly up Matthew’s back and down his arms. “I only let one other person do it before, and he fucking sucked.”

Matthew laughs at the way profanity trips beautifully off Randall’s tongue. He’s a swearing man and an outdoorsy, rugged type. Matthew wouldn’t have called it.

“What, he didn’t take care of you after?”

“No, he _didn’t_ ,” Randall blurts out, sounding hilariously enraged. He mutters, “That piece of shit.”

“You should’ve killed him,” Matthew teases, bending down to lick at Randall’s ear. “Should have stuck him here,” he whispers, splaying his fingers over Randall’s lower ribs right about where his kidney would be, “and let the sepsis wither him away.”

Randall scrunches his fingers in Matthew’s hair right at the base of his neck. “That’s a patient man’s murder.”

“Would you have done it with your teeth then?” Matthew asks, genuinely, wildly curious. “Would that have made you feel good?”

“It would have made me feel.”

A sound like a whimper jumps out of Matthew’s mouth when Randall kisses him again, fingernails scraping Matthew’s scalp and the other thumb pressing circles into Matthew’s nipple through his shirt. Matthew hisses and eases their mouths apart. He moans when Randall chases after him with his tongue, first on his lower lip and then on his chin before edging down his jaw. His head drops back, and he groans, “Are you sure you can’t get it up?”

“You’re more than welcome to try.”

The effort wouldn’t quite be worth it if he couldn’t bring Randall off with him, and he suspects, for all his eagerness, that neither of them will be able to perform like he wants. Suppressing a tortured whine, Matthew tries, “What about tomorrow, in the morning?”

Randall raises an eyebrow at him. “Stay the night?”

“Yes.” Matthew kisses him and shudders embarrassingly hard when Randall sighs against his lips. “Stay the night; have explosive sex in the morning. If I can walk after, I’ll make you breakfast.”

The clearly entertained chuckle that earns him from Randall just about sets his heart soaring.

“I’m not sure if I feel motivated or discouraged.”

“I’ll make you breakfast anyway.” Matthew waves his hand. “Please, stay, and I’ll make you all the pancakes you want once we’re done.”

“Yeah, fine,” Randall says like it’s some kind of inconvenience to him to be asked to stay over for sex and breakfast. Matthew checks, and there is, in fact, a tiny smirk on Randall’s face. “Consider me persuaded.”

Matthew sighs and buries his face in Randall’s neck, “ _Fantastic._ ”


	2. Communication Breakdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys have their morning in and bond—however ill-advised the gesture might be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Hey, girl, stop what you’re doin’! / Hey, girl, you’ll drive me to ruin / I don’t know what it is that I like about you, but I like it a lot / Won’t you let me hold you, let me feel your lovin’ charms_

Randall has morning breath, and it’s kind of the most adorable, domestic thing Matthew has ever encountered in a sexual partner. He’s behind him, huffing noisily—and beautifully—into Matthew’s shoulder, but he catches a whiff here and there and can’t help but smile. Ordinarily he’d ignore it even though it’s something of a turn-off for him, but he finds himself chuckling in between surprised moans and quickening pants. Randall, unsurprisingly, doesn’t seem so pleased that he’s laughing; he probably knows it’s something he’s doing that’s causing it. He reacts predictably enough and bites Matthew, hard.

And usually that’s not something Matthew’s particularly fond of either. It’s one of those kinks that he’s seen in other people and has always just soldiered down and tolerated, but he’s imagining what this must feel like for Randall. He’s trying to connect it to a behavior pattern. Really, it’s a diagnosis, and he performs it every time he’s with someone new, which isn’t as often as maybe it could be, but still. He sees enough action to know when something works for his bedmate. Randall likes biting him.

There’s no roughness to it to suggest the instinct itself is animalistic. Rather, it has a disciplinarian kind of flare to it, like he’s trying to get Matthew to pay attention to the right stimulus when bombarded by many. The move is quaintly traceable and diminutive. It’s something a person would do, maybe; that, or the strict, no-nonsense lioness catching her cub by the scruff of its neck.

Matthew doesn’t think either of those things is intentional judging by the half-lidded, focused look on Randall’s face when he turns to look at him over his shoulder. He’s determined. Every time he moves there’s a change in the angle or the speed or the force behind each smack and slide of their bodies moving together.

It drives Matthew kind of crazy, to put it lightly. He’s a mess—an honest to God fucking mess, shivering and grunting and trembling on his elbows. Randall sees his arms wobbling and presses him down by the back of his neck so he collapses face down into the sheets, hands scrambling blindly to get the pillow out from under his face so he can breathe. It clatters across his nightstand and takes out his alarm clock, a half-empty vial of Lithium, and a pad of sticky notes. Matthew moans long and loud into the sheet. Randall gasps against the side of his neck and fumbles a bit, knocking his nose into Matthew’s chin and pulling Matthew back by his hips.

When his back drags into an acute angle over the bed, Randall eases back into him, slowly. Matthew _whines_ , and then his hands fly out for the wall.

“ _Jesus_ ,” he whispers.

He hears Randall mutter, “God, I hope not,” before drowning out the sound of his voice with noisy, ecstatic pleas. Somewhere in that long list of ridiculous things Matthew is sure he says, he thinks he promises to kill Lecter nice and slow, make him suffer for throwing Randall to the side like he’s nothing when he’s fucking amazing.

And then he’s coming and forgetting to breathe or scream like he very much wants to do, and Randall’s pulling him up so that Matthew can sit on his cock. His back is sticky pressed up against Randall’s sweating chest. It’s fantastic. Matthew does what he can to make him feel good in turn, but _Christ_ , Randall was more pent up than he dared to anticipate. He thinks he needs this encounter more than he let on in the bar last night. 

Somewhere in between putting some deservedly exhausted gusto into the bouncing of his hips and dropping his head back onto Randall’s shoulder, Randall goes still, and quiet. A staggered breath steals past his lips, and then his lips press tightly together and his fingers squeeze Matthew’s hips, a fine tremor coursing through his palms like jolts of electricity dancing over water after a lightning storm. Matthew catalogues the roiling motion of his muscles relaxing: first Randall’s shoulders, then his arms, his thighs, and finally followed by his hands. 

Matthew swallows the noise that builds in his throat when that final pressure is lost. He doesn’t bruise easily, so he doesn’t worry about marks, but there is pain: a fleeting kind that’s glorious and vivid, although short.

“Please, sir, I want some more,” Matthew mumbles, grinning when Randall swats his thigh. He rolls his head from side to side against Randall’s shoulder and hums when Randall catches him mid-turn for a kiss that registers somewhere in between a low simmer and a burn. Matthew’s body is wonderfully spent. His smile fractures their kiss, and he repairs it by reaching for the back of Randall’s head and pulling him in for another one, and then another one. “How much more can I have after breakfast?”

“Sheesh,” Randall actually says—well, grouses. His hands migrate away from their lax perches on Matthew’s hips: one of them creeps up his ribcage and then other slides down Matthew’s thigh near his knee. Voice pleasantly hoarse still, he mutters, “Can we talk about it after breakfast?”

Matthew mewls thoughtfully as Randall splays his hand over his stomach. “Pancakes?”

Randall likes pancakes fine enough, so he says sure. Actually, he doesn’t say it so much as his lips make the shape of the word and he breathes around it, too lazy to make an honest effort for a word Matthew doesn’t need to hear to know that it’s his answer. A lot about Matthew is like that, intuitive. He’s impulsive—a man who’ll do something on a whim if the haul tantalizes his palate enough.

He’s going to get himself killed for Will Graham. The guy must be a Goddamn prize.

“Get off,” he whispers, this request being the more polite of the few he’d thought to say first. Matthew sighs and fidgets a bit, his fingers moving slowly and his knees set in an uncoordinated droop that brings a smirk to Randall’s face.

_Good,_ he thinks. _Try to kill him now, you newborn foal._

After a few seconds more of indulging himself with the show Matthew unwittingly provides him, he slips his arms around Matthew’s body, one all the way across his chest and the other beneath his thigh. He nips at Matthew’s ear and then his neck when he doesn’t budge in the slightest. Randall pokes him in the ribs and groans, “Come on, Brown.”

“I didn’t tell you my name was Brown,” Matthew protests immediately, though his words come lazily with an unforced disinterest.

“Brown, Matthew W.,” Randall recites, looking pointedly at the fallen orange vial with the lithium tablets inside. Matthew doesn’t see him looking what with his eyes closed and his head lolling around on Randall’s shoulder. His hair is clumped into messy little spikes still with drying sweat and it tickles Randall’s neck and his cheek when he turns to glance at him. The way he says his name, though, there’s no question as to where he would have read it. “What’s the W?”

Matthew scowls like he bit into something sour. “Walter.”

He opens his eyes when Randall laughs at him. “All right, tough guy. What’s your middle name?”

Randall closes his eyes and says, “Harland.”

He doesn’t bite when Matthew laughs. It’s a nice kind of laugh: weary, delighted, effortlessly intimate, and warm. It’s one of the more offensive thoughts Randall could be having, but Matthew’s nothing like Dr. Lecter. Randall has half a mind to ask if he’s like Will Graham—if Matthew likes the answer, whether it’s yes or no.

To stop himself from considering the options too seriously, he tries, “Come on, you’re heavy.”

Matthew hums once and leans forward, working with Randall this time to get off him. They both grumble a bit about aches and pains, and then Randall’s letting Matthew shove him down gently back onto the bed.

“Breakfast,” he complains, frowning when Matthew clambers off the bed and sidles into the connecting bathroom.

He sighs, disgruntled, and taps his feet against the wall at the head of the bed, arms falling to the sides. One of them dangles over the edge comfortably. His other eases the condom off, and after a moment of indecision, he uses both to tie it off and fling it toward the bin under Matthew’s nightstand. He misses and decides it’s a problem for a later time.

Randall flops onto his back again. Blood edges up the base of his neck and spreads along his forehead at the angle, but he doesn’t stir or sit up. Matthew comes back into the room a minute later with an off-white towel folded twice, saturated with water from the faucet. He nudges Randall’s wrist with his knee in silent request for him to make room for him to sit on the long edge of the bed. Randall shimmies to the left, bracing his dangling hand on the mattress for leverage. When Matthew sits beside him, Randall pushes up to his elbows into a less vulnerable position. He still has to look up at him, but it’s better like this, with 7 AM sunlight coming in through the blinds and filling Matthew’s room with an orange tint.

“When were you diagnosed?”

Matthew flicks his eyes up to Randall’s, an intrigued look opening up his expression. It’s a safe subject. Randall’s glad somehow, though he’d back down with no further questions if it weren’t up for discussion.

“I was sixteen; made my parents’ lives hell.” He shrugs and gives a small headshake. “Un _til_ they took me to a doctor and put me on pills.”

“Do you like them?”

“I’ve only been off ‘em once, and that one time _without_ them, I was all over the place,” Matthew murmurs, smirking at Randall’s whoosh of a sigh when he swipes the rag over the head of his cock. “To be perfectly honest, everything before the lithium, now, seems like…” He hums contemplatively and scrubs the towel gently down Randall’s thigh where he got lube on himself. “It’s like a Technicolor photograph that got smudged and faded after too many people touching it carelessly.”

There’s a faraway look on his face that’s incredibly familiar to Randall. He _knows_ that one; he _gets_ that emotion that’s distance and little else.

His mouth falls open, and the breath stops in his throat. _I get it,_ he wants to say.

But in the next flickering moment, he’s sure that he doesn’t—sure that there’s no way for anyone to ever know what he thinks or what Matthew thinks or what they don’t think or don’t feel or don’t want or don’t care for.

“Hey,” Matthew coos at him, tossing the dirtied towel onto the pile Randall made of the clothes he slept in. “Stick around.”

Randall’s eyebrows twitch down once. “I’m…”

He’s about to remind Matthew that he promised to make breakfast, but then he catches what he’s actually saying, and he grinds to a stop. “Yeah,” Matthew mumbles, threading his fingers through the hair at the back of his head and bringing Randall in for a kiss that’s closed lips and light pressure—just unfair and ridiculous and perfect.

And, _Oh, no,_ Randall thinks, slipping his fingers along the curve of Matthew’s elbow and drawing them up to probe at his biceps. _No, but…_

Matthew’s hand falls from his hair and slides down the side of his neck so his thumb lays flat along his throat and Randall’s pulse beats slowly under his first two fingers. Randall blinks his eyes open and stiffens when he realizes he’s bared his neck as naturally as breathing. Matthew drops his hand before Randall can tell him, which kindles strange warmth in his belly, under his eyes, and in the back of his neck.

“You don’t want something else?” Matthew asks softly, his voice pinched in a small way. Randall’s lips part, and Matthew blinks a bit rapidly, understanding something Randall clearly doesn’t. He breathes, “Other than pancakes.”

Randall drops his eyes and releases his lip from between his teeth to ask, “How’re your omelets?” 

“Pretty fucking great.” Matthew grins and gets to his feet.

Randall looks at him, and looks. “You’re facing me next time.”

Matthew barks a laugh and crosses his arms over his unclothed chest. All of him is satisfyingly bare. Randall’s naked, too. He stands, and Matthew gives him the same kind of look he got from Randall. His eyes linger on a spot on his chest just beneath Randall’s throat and then scan lovingly along the set of his shoulders. Randall knows what he looks like. His abs are not on par with Matthew’s because honestly, the things are sculpted, but his upper body is toned—enough muscle definition to them to evidence the kind of exercise he gets regularly.

“So there _will_ be more after breakfast,” Matthew absolutely purrs. “Let’s get you fed then, Randall _Harland_.”

“Yes, please,” Randall says, also crossing his arms, “Matthew _Walter_.”

Matthew grins and trots to his dresser for some folded up boxers. He holds up a second pair and raises his eyebrows. Randall waves his hand and stoops to collect his jeans from the floor. He shakes them out twice and pulls them on, just for decency’s sake, he supposes, and leaves the rest of his clothes to wrinkle at his feet. Shirtless is a good look on him. Randall’s not built or anything, but he’s healthily athletic, robust, and probably flexible— _clearly_ has no trouble with finicky things like stamina or strength.

_What I wouldn’t give…_ he thinks, closing the dresser door. Randall’s got nice feet, too. Matthew conjures up an image in his mind of drawing them into his lap and tracing circles all along the dorsum and dragging his knuckles back up the plantar side with his own bare feet up on the coffee table.

He swallows and leads the way out of the room, continuing on ahead when Randall crouches again to get something else from the floor. They rendezvous again in the kitchen with Matthew kneeling to retrieve the skillet from one of the cabinets and Randall strolling in and sitting at the table. For the first few minutes while Matthew’s gathering ingredients, Randall just sits quietly, straight-backed and unbothered. Matthew discovers a package of chanterelles with half the contents remaining and asks if Randall likes mushrooms.

“Sure,” he says over the edge of his hand, drumming his fingers on his cheek.

Matthew sets the package down on the counter and plants his hands on his hips. “Tell me what you do like.”

“Ham,” Randall says blandly. “Spinach, most grains, carrots…I don’t care for lamb, or curry.” He pauses and looks up at the ceiling like he’s really thinking about it. “I also like bell peppers. Mushrooms are okay.”

Biting back a small smile and then turning to the fridge when it twitches across his face anyway. He crouches to plumb the crisper for the green and red bell peppers he knows he has already chopped up from dinner a few nights ago. Raising his voice a bit so he can be heard with his voice directed at the fridge, he says, “Okay, I can go ham, peppers, and onion, or I can go mushrooms, garlic, and parsley.”

“The second one.”

“Got it.”

The next time he looks up from the stove as he’s pulling an apron on over his head Randall has a book opened in front of him. Matthew can’t tell which one, but it’s probably from the shelf in the living room. He waits for Randall to turn the page and then asks, “What’s your last name?”

“Tier.”

“Randall Harland Tier,” Matthew muses to himself when he turns back to his work at the cutting board. He thinks about his name for a second and then laughs. “Your middle name is almost an anagram of your first name.”

The look on Randall’s face tells him people have pointed out the coincidence before. He drones, like it pains him to say it out loud, “It’s my eldest sister’s favorite story to tell at parties.”

Conversationally, throwing some onions and sugar onto the skillet, Matthew asks, “What’s her name?”

“Diana,” Randall says easily without looking up from his book.

“And your other sister?”

Randall rests his head against his fist, temple lined up with knuckles. “Josie,” he answers with a kind of tenderness that surprises Matthew and makes his hands stop what they’re doing. Randall rounds his shoulders minutely, a small enough gesture that it looks accidental. “It’s actually short for Joanna. I’m the only one who calls her that.”

“Old habit from childhood?”

“Yeah.” Randall pinches the corner of the page he’s on, a soft look on his face. “Everyone in our family called her Joanie until she was thirteen, and for some reason I was calling her Josie that whole time. I stopped eventually, but then she started using it to sign all her holiday cards to me, and I went back to calling her Josie.”

Matthew stirs the onions and covers them, setting the oven timer for thirty minutes. The rest of the raw ingredients get tossed together into a large glass bowl. There are eggs in the fridge for when the mixture on the stove is ready. In the meantime, Matthew sweeps out of the kitchen and sits across the table from Randall. The size of the table and the combined lengths of their legs make it possible for Randall’s jeaned shins to graze Matthew’s calves and for Matthew’s toes to pinch at the hem of one pant leg and tug—and for Randall to call Matthew “monkey feet”.

“What was your brother’s name?”

Randall slides the book across the table when Matthew averts his eyes to the upside down pages he can’t read from where he’s sitting. Matthew tells him his brother’s name was Tim and expands by saying, “Nine-eleven.”

“Oh.”

Matthew nods. “Firefighter. When the towers went down he’d been living in the city for something like five years. We knew right away. No one contacted us until a little while later, but.” He nods, turning pages and skimming. Randall picked, Henry James’ _The Beast in the Jungle_. “It was one of those things, where there’s no information, but there’s no doubt either.”

“You were just a kid, right?”

“Out of high school.” Matthew closes the book and studies the plain cover. It’s sort of ugly. He’d seen far more elaborate artwork done for the work in the past, so he doesn’t really know why he bought the most boring rendition of it. “I was away from home, too. Already came out here.”

“Where’d you live before?”

“Boston.”

“I can see that.”

Matthew laughs and rises to get the timer when it goes off. He stirs in the chopped vegetables and a spoonful of vinegar, leaving the pan uncovered for the time being to set some toast going and preheat the oven. Over his shoulder he calls out, “You like wheat, right?”

“Yes,” Randall says, right behind him.

“Sweet,” he murmurs, reaching for the half-loaf just on the other counter. “Two pieces or one?”

“Just one.”

“Mmhmm,” Matthew hums.

“Do you miss him?”

“Sometimes.” He nods, giving Randall a brief, reserved glance. “He was the only one who ever had any patience with me. After he died, it was kind of…difficult.” The toaster makes a metallic _shink_ sound when he depresses the lever and sends the two sheaves of bread down to be warmed. “It’s not like they wished they’d lost me instead, but it wrecked them, Tim’s death.”

Matthew sighs and gets some butter and the egg carton from the fridge. “He was a good big brother.”

“I believe you.”

It means an awful lot, in a way Matthew can’t really fathom entirely. He stops what he’s doing, stops trying to distract himself, and looks head-on at the funny, awkward, slightly-feral Randall Harland Tier, former patient and active not-accomplice to Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

“Why?”

Randall shakes his head like he doesn’t know. “I guess it’s because you believe me, too.”

Something pitiful like a laugh jumps out of Matthew’s mouth, and he lets his head fall forward. Randall takes a step toward him. It gives Matthew such a comfortable, lazy rush of uncertainty that he can’t trust himself to know what to expect from Randall that he just closes his eyes and relaxes his shoulders. He barely feels Randall’s fingers fussing with the frayed edges of the apron and lifts his arms just enough to be accommodating. His agitation is familiar, the kind Matthew used to present with that Timothy always resolved with bear hugs.

The tight, jagged twist of pain in his chest is cold. Their father was the one who called them bear hugs. Timothy used to say they were King Cobra Strikes. The Brown men apparently have a thing for animal imagery.

“Can I—?” Randall asks in a small voice that doesn’t sound like him at all.

Matthew angles his head to one side and whispers, “Yeah,” holding his arms out wider so Randall can slink his arms around his waist. It’s a slow, testing thing, not a common triviality Matthew typically likes to explore, but the rampant curiosity behind the confused, clumsy gesture has him intrigued. He slides his palms up along the contoured ridges of Randall’s shoulder blades. “You like this stuff?”

“Which stuff?” Randall asks, the question muffled by Matthew’s shoulder.

Matthew leans carefully to the side so he doesn’t disentangle himself from Randall but frees himself up to check Randall’s expression. “Intimate stuff.”

“It’s strange,” he replies with his voice gentle and low. “I’m not used to it.”

“Kind of like wearing the wrong skin?” Matthew guesses, tilting his head when Randall meets his eyes.

“Like, trying to fly with the wrong equipment.” He unwinds his arms slowly, taking his sweet time to get his hands laid out along the sides of his ribs. “Imagine a fish out of water, and the only way he knows how to breathe is underwater.”

“You say the most beautiful things sometimes,” Matthew murmurs with a wide smile on his face.

Randall’s cheeks pink, and Matthew kisses him, softly and slowly and with his hands closing around Randall’s wrists.

“How’s that?” he whispers into Randall’s chin.

“’S all right.” Randall’s fingers twitch against Matthew’s skin.

“Omelets are almost done, okay?”

Randall nods mutely, tugging on his hands and dropping them to his sides when Matthew releases him. He moves the vegetables around into different bowls and cracks more than half the eggs in the carton into a separate bowl to scramble them with a fork. The eggs pour neatly over half the mushroom stir-fry in the skillet and then finish cooking in the oven. It’s over fairly quickly. Matthew serves up large portions on two plates and gets a separate plate for the toast. Randall takes the omelets to the table and Matthew picks up the silverware, napkins, and butter and jam for the toast. He doubles back for two glasses of milk after checking with Randall, who is as agreeable and easy as Matthew expects, which is annoying, but there’s nothing for it.

“Had you killed anyone before Andrew Sykes?” Randall asks as he’s smearing strawberry jam on his toast.

Matthew nods. “One person—it was…a few years after Tim. I was in New York. Still couldn’t tell you _why_. Wanted closure, maybe. Going to the funeral, it wasn’t—didn’t feel like goodbye.” He moves his food around on his plate and takes a big bite of his toast, counting on Randall not to speak while his mouth is full, which he doesn’t. “I was on the streets for a few days. I mean, I had a room in this cheap motel, and all my stuff was there, but I just, didn’t…”

He’d slept in alleyways and in garbage heaps for weeks: no phone, no money, no ID, no lithium. Now, after so many years of reflection, he can say with some certainty that he went to New York looking to kill or be killed. At the time, it had been just melodramatic enough to more closely resemble a precarious downward spiral than an outright suicide attempt. All these years later, and he still doesn’t know which one would have been much better if at all. He emaciated himself and went off his meds because he couldn’t just start a fight in a crowded parking lot like the rest of his species. No, Matthew Brown needed to go the extra mile and hide his tracks. It worked well enough, though he isn’t sure _why_ it did. Nobody ever came sniffing for him, not in Baltimore or New York City or Boston, fucking nowhere.

“Who was it? Did you know?”

“Some rich guy who got his rocks off torturing the homeless population in Manhattan,” Matthew tells him.

Daintily, so daintily, Randall retorts. “Didn’t ask who he was.” Matthew looks at him, fork stopping halfway to his mouth. “I asked for his name.”

A smirk flickers across his face, and Matthew laughs to show his disbelief. “ID said Daniel Verger.”

Randall hums once and wolfs down a few big bites of the omelet. Matthew beams, inwardly. As soon as he eats enough that he’s satisfied enough to slow down, Matthew asks him if he’s ever gotten close to killing anyone or if he’s ever had the urge to do it but stopped himself before he could commit to it.

Randall thinks about it. There were a few times in rugby matches where he nearly snapped the other guy’s neck on a rough takedown. Acts of that nature could have passed it off as unfortunate accidents, and he always dismissed them as soon as they leapt into his mind. That wasn’t going to be his legacy. He was going to be deliberate; he was going to be impossibly original and unprecedented. The mess he’d make would be extraordinary, even if he killed himself carving out that legacy. Especially if he killed himself.

“Once or twice I thought I could do it and get away with it, but they wouldn’t have been right. Would have been a temporary high, and the cheap buzz of simple killing would have had to sustain me. I’d burn out that way, with too little too soon.”

“You’ll want random victims when you start?”

“Faceless prey,” Randall confirms, tearing off a piece of toast with his teeth. “The way it should be—nothing personal.”

“We’re so different and so alike,” Matthew muses with a secretive little smile on his face that Randall doesn’t try to interpret. “Even the fundamental reasoning we have underneath our most basic principles are completely opposite, and yet, weirdly, intrinsically similar.”

“Something about hawks and ordinary birds,” Randall mumbles, taking a huge bite of his massive omelet. The look on Matthew’s face puts a pause in his chewing. “What?”

“Did I tell you about that?”

“What, your contract on Lecter or your thing about birds?”

“I told you about hawks and ordinary birds,” Matthew repeats softly to himself.

“Too much to drink, Matty?”

“ _No,_ ” he insists, mollified. “Randy.”

Randall snorts, willing to take it because why the hell not? He drinks some milk and tongues at the spot in the corner of his mouth. “Oh. Graham’s judge; you kill him, too? You only mentioned Sykes, but Sykes was just the bailiff, right?”

Matthew bristles, and Randall frowns. “That was someone else.”

And just something about it—something about the situation and the aggravation underlining Matthew’s tone—is not copacetic. Randall tries to nudge Matthew’s ankle and accidentally kicks him in the shin. Matthew seems to catch his intent, though, so he’s not too irritated as a result, but it’s not the desired reaction. Randall looks under the table, making a very obvious show of himself, and curls the top of his foot around Matthew’s calf and inches down all the way, focusing as he goes, until he meets the ground and brushes Matthew’s Achilles’ tendon.

He says, “Tell me about Verger.”

Matthew’s eyes are dark when Randall brings his eyes topside. He thinks he realizes that he’s asking about the only kill of the three capable of being attributed to him that has nothing to do with either Lecter or Graham. It’s a compromise. He’s heard that that’s what adults do.

His foot slides off of Matthew’s leg when he turns his toes out and edges Randall’s foot far enough that his knee drops to one side. He murmurs, setting his fork down, “Before or after I got to him?”

“Before, first.”

“He was a talker,” Matthew says, eyes fading glazing and lapsing into a memory Randall can’t follow. “From the start he came in talking on his cell phone, about nothing at all. I tried listening to the guy, and it was just meaningless trash, everything that came out of his mouth. Thought there might be some kind of pattern or code to it, but it was simple. He was a simple.”

Matthew toes at Randall’s ankle with his right foot, the left still planted directly parallel to Matthew’s right. 

“And me, I’d been out there surviving on panhandled money for almost three weeks by the time he got there. I knew all the regulars. Every new face, I’d learn their names and how they got to be where they were within a few hours. They all thought I was one of those delinquent kids who can’t stay home because his parents are awful and abuse him, but I never told them about my home life. I just let them think I came from an impoverished place, that I was hitting bottom.”

Randall drops his eyes and eases into a lower slouch in his seat. Matthew kneads at the juncture above his knee with the heel of his foot. “Weren’t you?” he asks quietly.

“Yeah, I was.” Matthew reaches for the apron string still knotted at the back of his neck and yanks the ugly thing off, tossing it to the right somewhere. His foot creeps up mid-thigh and digs into his leg, looping and rubbing in gentle-rough-hard circles through Randall’s jeans. “This guy thought we were all at bottom, so far down we couldn’t even see the light coming down.”

Catching Matthew’s ankle with his fingers in a loose manacle, he mumbles, “You were waiting for him just like a spider in the dark.”

“We were both in the dark,” Matthew says, bringing his fork back to his mouth. He shrugs and leans both elbows on the table, shoulders hunched and back straight. With a confidential chord in his words, he continues, “Out of nowhere, this guy, _Daniel Verger_ tells his buddy on the phone he’s going under a tunnel, and he’s losing service—not to try calling him for a while because he’s going to be on the road. He hangs up, tucks the phone in his pocket, and makes straight for this other guy nodding off just a few feet down the road, Bobby. It’s then that I can see him, and at this point in my life, I’ve been angry enough and sick enough to know he’s got one thing on his mind: just to cause pain, any old way that he can.”

“What was Bobby’s story?” Randall lets Matthew wiggle his foot out of his grip and grits his teeth at the slow wave of pleasure that shocks in his stomach when Matthew buries his toes in the sharp curve in between Randall’s groin and his thigh. He keeps his voice steady and asks, “Veteran, alcoholic, drug addict?”

“The last one. He was older but not so much that he couldn’t defend himself if he needed to, which Verger found out after the first cheap shots he got in. Now, Bobby lost one of his arms in some kind of freak accident he never liked to talk about, and I imagine _that’s_ why Verger chose him—because he physically _looked_ like an easy target, but in a fair fight, he’d have laid Verger out five minutes in. Psycho would’ve run off with his tail between his legs, wallet missing and phone smashed in his pocket.”

“That’s not what happened,” Randall sighs, spreading his legs wider. He stifles a groan when Matthew ghosts over the zipper of his jeans and then presses down harder.

“Verger ran off a ways down the street and started going through his briefcase. Bobby thought it was over, but the guy took out a claw hammer when his back was turned—this nasty, vicious thing with a long, grooved handle. Bobby’s walking off on his way without a thought for his safety.” Matthew scoffs and rubs his hands together, foot stilling temporarily in Randall’s lap. “I wait until he passes me, and then I take out the toilet tank lid I salvaged my first week in Manhattan. I kept it stashed behind this putrid dumpster at the edge of an unmonitored parking lot.”

Randall shivers and Matthew takes his foot away, skimming down his thigh, grazing the point of his knee, and dragging down the side of his calf. He rises from the table and walks backwards in the direction of his bedroom, smirking at Randall when his chair screeches behind him.

“And then what’d I do, Randall?” he breathes, sneaking his thumbs under the waistband of his boxers that Randall very much wants to be the one to take off. He surges forward and stops Matthew’s hands, forcing him back into the wall and all the air out of his lungs in one forceful breath. “You’ve got the right idea,” Matthew chuckles around a wicked grin, throwing an arm around Randall’s neck and sucking his bottom lip into his mouth.

“Tell me you didn’t hit him over the head,” Randall pleads, grabbing fistfuls of those deep navy boxers and shoving them down

Matthew unbuttons his jeans and deftly works the fly open. “Side of his knee,” Matthew says, happy to be on the right side of Randall’s rebuke. “He went down, dropped the hammer. The tank lid survived another good blow to his chin, but…” Matthew lets Randall carry him back into the bedroom and grins when Randall climbs on top of him on the bed, face-to-face just like he specified.

Randall finishes his sentence for him: “But you wanted the hammer.”

He lets his legs fall open to give Randall all the space that he needs and breathes, still smiling wide with teeth, “That I did.” The light catches in his eyes, and Randall wills his body to slow down and pay attention. Matthew swallows twice. “Ask me what I did with it,” he mouths, the words little more than puffs of breath against Randall’s lips. “Ask.”

Randall’s tongue darts out once to taste that word lingering on Matthew’s lips, and then he’s nodding yes and easing his fingers into Matthew’s mouth. He bites his lip as he’s withdrawing his fingers and asks what Matthew did with the hammer. Randall eases Matthew along through the various stages of arousal as his own kindles and rages: interest, yearning, rapacious hunger, shameless desperation…

He slinks right into the swell of his appetite and describes the noise the claw of the hammer made when Matthew forced Verger up onto his hands and knees and swung like he was in the World Series. Randall noses at his navel, and Matthew laughs airily, clutching his shoulder and scratching his scalp out of reflex. He seizes his moment of clarity to say, “Just like stabbing a trowel into mud, but a lot quicker and wetter: _ssssffth_.”

The sensuous little hitches in Matthew’s breathing has Randall more than a little curious about whether it’d be worth it to let Matthew top. He _had_ worked to get Randall off even after he was good and done, and once they were both finished he’d brought something back to clean Randall up with. If his argument against letting Matthew fuck him is that he wants to be seen to and not just used for someone else’s pleasure, he picked the wrong generous, intuitive not-sociopath-because-the-term-is-outdated-Randall-don’t-call-me-a-sociopath-that’s-not-what-I-am guy.

It’s probably too late to have a change of heart now. Here they are, already: Matthew panting for it and nearly ready to take on the full girth of a cock in his ass, and Randall hard enough not to _want_ to wait, but—it had looked so good on Matthew when Randall made him come. It crashed over him like a wave, and the sounds Matthew made were unreal.

But Matthew’s looking at him, making that face he makes when the gears in his brain are turning as if he’s learning something complex and novel right as it’s happening to him. He pinches his eyes shut and reaches down to grab Randall’s wrist with spasmodic fingers. “Want me to?” he asks on a heavy sigh, catching his breath.

Randall nods yes, smothering the vague apology or excuse trying to bloom in his mouth. He repeats the word, _Compromise_ to himself but doesn’t say it to Matthew because even though this clearly means they’ll be without orgasms for probably the next hour or so, he looks genuinely _thrilled_. There’s a pleased, happy smile on his face when rolls them over and tugs at Randall’s knees, laying him flat with his legs splayed out on either side of him.

Matthew uses a lot of lube, which Randall has mixed feelings about because the mess is distracting, but his fingers feel nice. He’s slow to try for speed and friction, but Randall’s body is relaxed enough—strange, or maybe perfectly understandable—that two fingers don’t pose any kind of problem for him. The stretching from there takes a bit more work, but Matthew’s mouth is everywhere. His tongue is quick and lingering and everywhere he wants it and nowhere he doesn’t want it; he’s unpredictable in the best kind of way.

The ebb and flow of that unique brand of expanding, searing pain of three fingers twists into a different kind of ache that’s deep and hypnotic. And Matthew’s perceptive as hell because once he can tell Randall’s into it he starts to give him less and less until Randall’s body moves for it and the tension in his jaw drains and leaves him slack and reckless all over. His heartbeat stutters and his stomach dips and his hips jump off the bed, and he makes a noise that has Matthew grinning against his hip and twisting his hand so that Randall swears, loudly. 

He cares a lot less about lube then, though it’s certainly much messier than he dared to think he could enjoy. The only thing that really matters is that Matthew doesn’t stray too far away once he starts to come apart, though he does have to make a quick exception to get a condom.

“How do you like it?” Matthew asks later—Christ, _a long time later,_ Randall thinks—with one hand wrapped tightly around his own cock and the other pumping in and out of Randall’s ass fast and hard, and _Oh,_ Randall likes that— _yeah, fine,_ he maybe says or doesn’t say.

_Yeah, anything, just go come on Matthew fucking Harland Brown give it to me Goddamn it._

And then they’re scrambling into a different position, and Randall’s legs are shaking and he’s kissing Matthew hard. He lets himself be handled, lets the hands on his body wanders even as he has to shut out the quiet doubt in his mind telling him this won’t be good, won’t feel good, that it’ll make him less…but then—

_There it is_.

His body sings, and he’s suspended—or no, Matthew’s holding him, supporting his shoulders with both hands, and Randall’s knees are widely spaced on either side of Matthew’s body.

Something relentless and sharp quivers to life in the pit of his stomach and in the small of his back. It demands _more_ , and so he moves faster and faster to feed its craving. Matthew’s mouth drops open, and his head falls back. A high noise like a bird in the jungle would make teases out of Matthew’s throat, and Randall _fucks_ him as if he were still the one on top—which he actually is, logistically speaking, riding Matthew like his life depends on it. Maybe his life does depend on it. Matthew’s survival could hinge upon it, at the very least.

Matthew tries to touch him when he gets close, and Randall lets him, holding himself up with his hands on Matthew’s chest and wandering down those absurd abdominal muscles that tense and roil under Randall’s fingertips and the sticky, hot glide of his palms. Those are Randall’s, too. His eyes flutter shut at the licks of pleasure lashing at his insides and painting him with a different kind of tension than he’s usually rigid with. His mouth falls open and gasps for breath, fingers squeezing and body curling in until Matthew takes his hand away to help himself sit up just as an orgasm starts burning up in Randall’s system and wringing him out.

Randall makes another noise, confused, but doesn’t move. Matthew’s intentions are clear enough, and anyway, the last wave trembling inside him is only just dying down, so he goes still and closes his eyes again to relish it for as long as it lasts. As soon as it passes, Randall swivels his hips in place and lets Matthew steer him with a hand on his back and another holding fast to his scapula.

Matthew has a good sense for tact and understanding, not solely with Randall’s body but with everything else, too. Matthew can figure him out with a look and can make this feel like something it isn’t but somehow _must_ be.

He’s his own kind of ruined, mutilated beast. Randall never collects or saves anything apart from the skeletons he restores in a professional setting at work, and of course, the suit, but he’d like to preserve this. Whether Lecter gets the jump on Matthew or whether Will Graham does, whatever happens, he wants this. He tells himself he can have it, always, because it’s his for right now.

And really, impermanence is the best that anyone can ever hope for, isn’t it? Randall touches extinction with his hands every day. He’s not one to think that anything lasts, ever.

“They give you Eskalith, too?” Matthew mumbles, out of breath but curious enough and surprising Randall from his thoughts.

He huffs an amused chuckle and gets his hands on Matthew’s shoulders. “Risperdal.”

“Bipolar or schizophrenic?” Matthew inquires expertly. He grunts once and pulls Randall down into him more forcefully.

A gratified curse builds on Randall’s lips, but instead he says, “Schizoaffective,” and moans brokenly, “disorder.”

“I figured there was a dis- in there somewhere,” Matthew breathes. He sucks in a deep breath and flips them over so Randall’s flat on his back with his hands up near his head. “Back at the bar, I mean; had you pegged.”

“Con _gra_ tu _la_ —” Randall drops his head back and swallows. “Good for you,” he grits out.

Matthew coaxes another ruthless orgasm out of him and lets Randall come this time. His fingers crush into fists, incidentally scraping Matthew’s skin with blunt nails, and he makes a harsh sound in the back of his throat. He convulses once and trembles for a few seconds longer, looking gorgeous and absurdly, plainly regular, though Matthew knows he’s a hawk, too.

_What a fucking sight,_ he thinks, and buries his face in Randall’s throat because Randall shivers and lets him, and like hell is he going to let that privilege pass him up. Maybe it’s a reward for outperforming his standards or for setting him off twice in one sitting. It could be a _thank you_ for agreeing to take the time to do it and for doing it right. Or maybe Randall just trusts Matthew not to take it lightly, which he doesn’t, not one bit.

“Bite me, mark me,” Randall whispers, looking ravaged and succulent with his eyes unfocused.

There’s white splattered on his stomach and smeared higher on his chest where Matthew’s body touched his. It wouldn’t be right not to give him what he wants when he’s asking so nicely, so Matthew does the sensible thing and complies with the request. He picks a spot right in between Randall’s sternum and clavicle and _bites_.

And really, honestly, it’s still not a thing he particularly likes, but Randall is _so_ into it, albeit incapable of getting it up again so soon after ejaculation. Matthew bears down enough with his teeth that Randall groans, and then he holds his mouth over that abused skin and sucks. After drawing it out a bit longer than is perhaps necessary, he eases off and checks the outcome of his handiwork. The skin is a dark red color and angrier burgundy right around the impressions of Matthew’s teeth.

Randall’s eyes are closed when he pulls back to look at him. He takes that as a good sign; even better when Randall weakly winds his legs around Matthew’s waist and groggily opens his eyes. He even undulates his hips a few times, and the look of it is enough to tip Matthew right over the edge.

Even after he’s come down, one of Randall’s legs stays looped around his back. The other has since wilted to one side; the hand on that same side is thrown back overhead holding onto the edge of the mattress. Matthew pulls out of him gently and watches Randall’s hand fall from his shoulder to the bed. The weight of Randall’s other leg enclosing them in an intimate knot remains consistent.

“Don’t go after him,” Randall says without inflection.

Matthew doesn’t ask why not. He reaches back and grabs Randall’s leg just underneath the knee and hesitates before guiding it down onto the bed. Randall’s staring up at him, daring Matthew to ask one more time why it matters.

He doesn’t ask.

Quietly, Randall tells him, “You’re an idiot.”

“So I’ve been told,” Matthew murmurs. They watch each other for a long time before Matthew clears his throat and asks, “How would you do it?”

Randall’s eyes slide slowly between Matthew’s, figuring. It hits Matthew then that he hasn’t considered there might be other reasons for Randall’s constant discouragement. He tries to dismiss it, at least until Randall can get his answer out. Concisely he answers, “Quickly.”

Matthew laughs in spite of himself and slinks off the bed. “Right, impatient.”

Randall sits up once Matthew’s standing and rotates so his feet are both on the floor. “You don’t think I’d do it.”

“Should I?” Matthew shrugs. “You’ve got some kind of buried history with that guy.”

There’s a mildly irritated expression on Randall’s face that might just be exasperation. “Are you asking if I’ve slept with him? Because I haven’t.”

Casually—because Matthew isn’t bothered to have it out if Randall lets him—he asks, “But you’ve wanted to, right?”

The agitation fades into something lesser, like resignation. He says, “Yeah.”

“What was his excuse? Ethics? Power imbalance?”

“A healthy cocktail of both, and I was underage at the time.”

Matthew laughs, shocking himself with the volume. “No, really? Underage by how much?”

“Shut up,” Randall grumbles, pushing himself to his feet and breezing past Matthew for the bathroom, still gloriously naked. “I was seventeen.”

“Let me guess: after, he referred you to someone else.”

Randall fumbles with the knob in the shower and crosses his arms when Matthew steps in to help him get the water going. He points his thumb over his shoulder and tells him, “This way for cold; the other way for hot. This thing makes the water come out the faucet. I’ll go out on a limb and say you don’t want a relaxing bath?”

He shrugs at Randall’s icy glare and skips out of the room for towels and Randall’s clothes. After standing for a minute in the doorway with a sloppy bundle of folded laundry, he sets the pile on the edge of the sink and crosses to the shower where he’s met with no resistance. Randall’s got soap in his hair and long spikes of it poking up at odd, hilarious angles. Matthew smothers his laugh and washes up, sharing the spray and the soap.

Matthew scrubs both hands across his scalp and closes one eye when the shampoo runs near his eye. “You said you were in that bar last night because he dumped you.”

“Yeah?” Randall steps around Matthew and leans out of the shower to get the towel Matthew left folded up on the toilet lid. He straightens out and assaults Matthew’s face with it to stop the soap from stinging his eye. “So what?”

Matthew sputters and yanks the towel out of Randall’s hands, who consequently drops his hands and then his eyes. Sounding endearingly embarrassed and looking like a kicked puppy, he asks, “Too hard?”

“Little bit,” Matthew sighs, slinging it over the horizontal rod supporting the shower curtain. “Tell me about Lecter then. What’d he do that had you drinking your feelings in a seedy bar?” He chuckles at the look Randall gives him.

He drones, “We used to go there sometimes, just for drinks.” He rolls his eyes. “It’s boring stuff, I promise.”

“ _We_ met at that bar and had drinks. You’re telling me it never escalated beyond just drinks?”

Randall shrugs and starts to get out of the shower. Matthew heaves a sigh and takes his time washing the suds off himself. There’s another towel waiting for him on the toilet tank lid when he switches off the water. Matthew ties it around his waist and ventures out into the hallway to find Randall in the living room sitting on the arm of the couch. His clothes are wrinkled, but he wears them well enough. Matthew leans one arm against the doorframe and waits. It takes a minute, maybe two, but Randall speaks.

“I kissed him once, a few months ago. We hadn’t seen each other in years, and then suddenly there were phone calls and visits to the bar, and sometimes in the parking lot he would touch me—never anything sexual; it was just lingering touches. They could have been casual if we were different people.”

“You got fed up with the cock tease.”

“I got fed up with a few things.” Randall looks away and clasps his hands together, thumbing an overlapped knuckle. “He’s obsessed with _your_ mutual friend, Will Graham.” He shakes his head and Matthew notices the discoloration at the lowest point of his neck like a congealed stab wound or a burn. It’s kind of trashy, and Matthew adores the way it somehow makes Randall look even more uptight than he usually does. “That night he wouldn’t shut up about him. Ever since they met it was like that, but _that_ night…

“There was something about a girl from Minnesota with a murderer for a father.” Randall laughs bitterly. “I guess she had him feeling paternal.”

“So, what, you cornered him in the parking lot?” Matthew asks gently.

“He’d just driven me home.” Even in profile, Matthew can see his frown and how deep it runs. He drops his voice and says, in a remarkably flat tone, even for him, “I dragged him inside and gave it everything I had.”

Matthew looks down past the red towel around his waist at his bare feet and wiggles his toes. He makes himself relax his hands and winces at the gradual retraction of his nails from his palms. Once the white has receded entirely from his knuckles he says, “Lecter didn’t want it.”

“No.”

He drums his fingers on the half knot securing the towel in place and approaches the stiff, barely breathing form refusing to look at him. Matthew sets his hands on each of Randall’s knees and sinks into crouch. 

“Graham’s doing the same thing to you, and you can’t even see it,” Randall mutters. Matthew starts to protest, but Randall stops him.

He turns his head just enough to look at Matthew and says, slowly, “It’s been too long since you were sick enough or angry enough. You’ve forgotten that some people can only feel anything if they’re hurting someone else.”

Randall drops his hands so they cover Matthew’s. His fingers fumble a bit clumsily until Matthew nudges their hands the right way. He has a flash out of nowhere of what kind of life they could carve out together, with Matthew leading the way when Randall could tolerate being led and Matthew surrendering that flimsy authority the second it made Randall uncomfortable. They would live together, and Randall would show Matthew the suit.

God, he wants to see the suit. He wants to see it almost as much as he wants to see Lecter dead at his feet.

It isn’t a consolation at all if Matthew is to Randall what Will Graham is to Hannibal Lecter. But he’s wondering if he can be to Randall what Lecter is to Graham—if Lecter is anything at all to his patient or if Randall could be to Matthew.

He backs away from that doubt, not liking it for a reason he’s afraid to name. The fact that he thinks to question it at all makes him feel like a coward. Randall doesn’t deserve a coward, not after Lecter making him think he can’t have him either. Christ, the way _everyone_ is after him for this reason or another, Will Graham would give anybody a complex. Randall _already_ needs a second body to make his own feel like it fits him right

Maybe instead of making unfair comparisons, Matthew should be asking himself if there could possibly be anything to Randall’s claim about Will Graham. And if he _is_ going to make comparisons anyway, then he should keep _all_ of the similarities in mind—among them being that Graham potentially set a trap for Matthew in sending him after his apparently highly capable doctor.

Anger isn’t the right emotion. Betrayal is closer. When he looks up at Randall and loses himself in those lazily empty eyes, he feels what it is: solidarity.

“Let me kill him for you,” Matthew whispers, turning his hands so he can slot their fingers together. He turns Randall’s hands in his and brushes his lips over his knuckles. “Let me, please.”

Randall’s eyes are closed and his eyebrows furrowed the next time Matthew raises his eyes to his face. He sighs, a terse, soft sound. “If you’ve made up your mind to do it anyway…” Matthew starts to nod, but Randall continues, “Then I get Graham.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Matthew murmurs.

And when Randall opens his eyes, his pupils are blown wide and there’s a small, tight smile on his face. It’s half a smirk and half a grimace. “Because you’re an idiot.”

Matthew bites his lip in a failed attempt to hide his answering smile at the truth clearly evident in his dilated pupils. He doesn’t know why he’d be happy to hear that Randall genuinely thinks him an idiot. “You have to kill him with the suit.”

Randall rolls his eyes, hands fidgeting for a few short seconds. “Can’t, not if he stays locked up in that box.”

“So we’ll get him out.” He maneuvers onto his knees and uses Randall’s legs as leverage to push himself up so he can steal a kiss off that faintly frowning mouth he’s become so fond of. He pulls back enough to separate their lips and winks. “We’re not the only ones looking out for his interests, remember?”

Randall scoffs. “No one’s looking out for Will Graham’s interests but Will Graham.”

“Yeah,” Matthew mumbles, cutting himself off with another press of his lips to Randall’s. “Lonely way to be.”

Randall stares at him for a long, slow count of ten seconds—pretty near to gazing if not gazing outright. He squeezes Matthew’s hands in his lap and releases one of them to slip those fingers into Matthew’s hair. “You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Matthew thinks to tell him he lied about that. He thinks to tell Randall that he’s an idiot just like him for believing it, but then Randall is leaning in and kissing him, and the urgency of the thought flickers and fades. Matthew lifts his freed hand to the bruised place on Randall’s neck and traces circles into his skin with one finger.

_I’d have this, instead,_ he thinks, all to himself, hoping that maybe Randall has a similar thought but not brave enough to ask if he does. It’s safer not to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mushroom Omelet  
> http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Mushroom-Omelette
> 
> From Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (S1, E6: _Entrée_ ): “Here we are: a bunch of psychopaths helping each other out.”


	3. Your Time Is Gonna Come

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Following Matthew’s arrest, Randall confronts his old doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Made up my mind to break you this time, / Won’t be so fine, it’s my turn to cry / Do want you want, I won’t take the brunt / It’s fadin’ away, can’t feel you anymore / Don’t care what you say ‘cause I’m goin’ away to stay, / Gonna make you pay for that great big hole in my heart_

Randall learns about most of Matthew’s excursion with Dr. Lecter on TattleCrime.com. The blog’s admin pays close attention to many angles that aren’t strictly journalistic in nature but that reveal a great deal of perspective, however misinformed. There is one clear photo of the interior of the pool where the blood stains the tile still in two localized areas. One uneven trail of it leads to the center of the room; the other splash of red is smaller and freckled at one side with bare footprints.

It’s not enough spare blood to suggest Matthew was fatally wounded. The article says he was taken into custody, but maybe it’s worse that way. He can’t say there’d be a difference to a bird between a coffin and a covered cage.

Randall refrains from throwing his laptop across the room and quietly turns it off instead. He tucks it away into a drawer and goes downstairs to the workshop where he stays for the remainder of the afternoon, evening, and night. The museum gives him time off when he asks since he’s never taken his sick days and generally produces better work than anyone else on hand.

When Kira asks out of curiosity why he can’t come in, he tells her there’s been a death in his family. His voice wavers when he says it, and she leaves it at that.

Dr. Lecter’s in the hospital when Randall stops by. He’s got company, so Randall stays in the shadows where it’s always been safest for him—and for Matthew. A woman and a serious-looking man in a suit without his jacket are at his bedside. She’s lovely, and the way she touches the swoop of Hannibal’s forearm tells Randall what she is. In an earlier point in his life it would have made him jealous, but Randall has this game down pat.

She’s got the same sort of features Will Graham does, apart from the obvious differences. Randall would laugh if his chest didn’t feel fit to burst at the shallowest nudge in the wrong direction. The man with them is probably police. Randall’s never seen him before. Regardless, he’s not going to take an unnecessary risk and out himself now before he’s even become a suspect in anything. Dr. Lecter is unconscious anyway It’s not as if Randall would be doing him any good if he made his presence known.

His vantage point down the hall isn’t entirely discreet. It’s better if he moves on.

_How many times has **that** worked out for you? _

He pats his pockets for the Risperdal he thought he’d secured on his person before he left the house. There’s nothing there. One missed dose shouldn’t set him too far back. He’ll need to take it tomorrow for sure.

_When was the last time I took it?_

Surely he’d only missed the one dose. He’d feel it if he’d been without the medication for longer than that—there’d be clarity, nauseating clarity and overstimulated nerves. It’d be bright, like smudged and faded Technicolor. Wouldn’t it? Yes.

He leaves the hospital and slinks steadily into reclusion, working overtime on the suit and internet stalking prisons until he finds out where they’ve stashed Matthew. Although he has to talk himself down twice, he doesn’t call. In case the prison’s monitoring outside interest in Matthew to weed out a partner, it’d be smarter for both of them to keep a safe distance for a while. It holds Randall over at least that he manages to locate him at the Chesapeake Detention Facility, formerly MCAC.

His fourth day in isolation he calls Dr. Lecter late in the workday. It goes straight to his answering machine. Randall takes a breath, changes his mind, and promptly hangs up. He didn’t have a plan going into it. Twenty minutes into another back-breaking session with the jaw component of the bear-wolf suit to adjust for changed wetted perimeter measurements, his phone rings and he answers without checking the screen, expecting either Kira or Dr. Lecter to be checking in with him. He is slightly preoccupied, scribbling equations and muttering them under his breath to compensate for the hydraulic radius and sheer stress in the interior of the movable mandible piece. 

Josie says, “Hi, baby brother.”

He knocks the Bosch 1640VS handsaw off the workbench and bites back the profanity aching to spill out of him like effluvium. The underside of his mandible hurts like a motherfucker for some reason. It’s tender to the touch.

“Josie, hey,” he sighs, rounding a crate with a gas-powered air compressor buried in Styrofoam. Swearing under his breath, the right numbers filter into his brain for the modified formula. He mutters it to himself, holding the phone away from his mouth. “Augmented cross sectional area of flow; that over ‘P’ yields, _oh,_ of _course_...Uh, what’s going on?”

“Well, you know me,” she muses, sounding amused at his rambling. “Keeping busy.”

He crouches to retrieve the fallen handsaw, eyeing the dismantled components of the air compressor as he straightens out. The soft spot on his jaw yields a purpled bruise in the reflective steel. He frowns at it, like giving the feature his most threatening look will encourage it to divulge what the hell happened to his face. Remembering foggily that he needs to reply he says, “Yeah?”

She hums, distracted. He sets down the power tool and walks away from the work station.

“Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s _wrong._ It’s just…I heard your old therapist made the news,” she says reluctantly, perhaps after telling herself that if she didn’t say it, no one would have.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I mean…you knew, right? I’m not springing this on you?”

“I knew about it.” He rubs a hand down his face and sinks against the far wall into a sitting position. “I saw him in the hospital a few days ago. He’s recovering just fine.”

“That’s…great to hear, Randall.” She sounds genuinely relieved. “I just worried because I know you sort of left off on the wrong foot with him, all those years ago. He’s probably got his own friends to think about, but you always talked really highly of him, until you didn’t.”

“What did you think I would do, antagonize him for being attacked by some lunatic?” He blinks around hot angry tears that are more inspired by frustration than anything else, or so he tells himself. “You didn’t feel inclined to check up on me after that other guy found him in his office last year and tried to kill him.”

“I read about that. It wasn’t nearly as close a call as this one was. This Freddie Lounds person is saying that he was hanging from the ceiling, bleeding out, just…Randall, I can’t imagine if that happened to someone I knew.”

It strikes him then like sound waves ambling through a barrier of layered fabric. She expects him to be frantic—just ill with worry. He doesn’t know which expression to plaster across his face for the purpose of telling his nervous system what to feel, so he keeps the blank stare and the slight frown. He is primarily confused and secondarily outraged. There’s no way to tell her that either of those two things exist in him or that they’re the bulk of what he’s lived with his entire life.

He thinks it would sadden her to learn his heart. To see the mechanical monster he’s crafting that reflects his beast’s temperament would shatter her. It’s the price he agreed to pay when he claimed the death of Will Graham for his own hands, claws, pilfered incisors, and manmade predatory flesh.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, Josie, I’m fine,” he intones, covering his eyes with his hand like it can protect him from her care and affection if he pretends to be blind.

“Did you get to talk to him at the hospital, when you went to visit him?”

“He was unconscious, and there were cops in his room. I think they needed a statement from him regarding his assailant.”

“It’s just awful,” she says soothingly. If she were in arm’s reach, she would probably risk a tight hug, knowing full well that only special occasions warranted the gesture. “Maybe you should call him. See if there’s anything you can do.”

“What do you expect to happen? We’re not _friends_. I’m just an old patient from a lifetime ago that he probably doesn’t even remember.”

This alteration of the truth is the best version of reality for her to be armed with. She cannot ever be collateral damage. Josie will not ever be compromised. Her family—even as it excludes him—will not live in the shadows of his unhappiness as accomplices. There will be no room on the part of the authorities to doubt that Josie would have stopped him if she just knew he needed to be stopped.

She sighs, always a maternal, longsuffering kind of exhale ever since they were kids. “You’re sure you’re all right? I know you’ve always been thick-skinned, but this is crazy, Randall, and—and it would be perfectly understandable if you were freaked out.”

“Well, I’m not, Josie.” 

Tentatively, so tentatively, she asks, “Randall, are…are you taking your medication?”

He stops breathing for a moment and pats his pockets down again, feeling time slosh and quicken around him. His jaw aches and when he sprints upstairs for the Risperdal he’s met by one dismantled microwave, a shattered television set, and a gutted couch. He swallows and rubs purposely hard at the bruise burning his skin and the meat underneath.

“Yeah,” he breathes, staggering into the bathroom and retrieving the half-depleted vial from the medicine cabinet about five days later than he intended. He shakes the required dosage out onto his hand and ingests the drug before he can change his mind. “Yeah, I almost forgot it today.”

“You need to take that with food, Randall,” she says evenly, tone leaving no room for argument. “Don’t make yourself sick.”

“Yeah, I know,” he cedes quickly, moving his tongue around in his mouth—too dry, not enough saliva. Maybe he’s dehydrated. “Look, I’m in the middle of work stuff. There are power drills involved.”

Something about his no-nonsense delivery makes her chuckle softly. A smile twitches over his lips in response. It’s too soon for the meds to have an effect on his system, but the fact that it’s there, presumably repairing the damage he wreaked upon it, makes him feel grounded, farther from his nerves, and closer to his thoughts. It’s not too much this way. The sight of the mess he left for himself in the living room and kitchen is a bit worse. He can’t remember why he did it or what he’d felt that made it seem like a good idea.

“Power drills, heavens.”

“It’s serious business.”

“Clearly,” she says, stifling another laugh. “You’ll call me if you start to feel not-okay?”

That phone call is maybe twenty years overdue, but he says, “At the first sign of trouble.”

“All right, fine,” she huffs. “I’ll leave you alone then.”

“Thank you, Josie,” he tells her quietly after a few shaky beats of silence.

After a few more, she says, “I love you, Randall.”

“I love you, too.”

He does. He really, really does, for whatever it’s worth in the grand scheme of things.

Randall catches glimpses of things he left in the delirium of insomnia and inveterate grief. The microwave had just been a project to keep his mind going when he couldn’t sleep but couldn’t trust his hands with the suit either. He’d done it plenty of times as a kid and once or twice as a teenager. It had given him some comfort, a regressive memory lined with nostalgia and unrepentant innocence.

The TV had seen his rage, and he’d seen it as a monster—bigger and more powerful than his chosen avatar will ever be. He thinks he’d gone at the couch with kitchen knives, imagining himself as a natural-born beast with daggers for hands.

His bruised jaw is something else that he can’t name straight away, but he thinks he probably just injured himself in the attack on the furniture. It’s hard to say. He never lost time before the diagnosis and the Risperdal. If he were still seeing her, his therapist would probably tell him something elaborate and psychological about stress and exhaustion. There’s some guilt in there, too—enough that he’s aware of it and enough that he can’t take it back once it’s been detected.

Work at the museum is slow, as usual. He’s got sick days left since he only took off a single work week. With the passing of the first weekend he couldn’t stand to let himself stagnate in the house any longer. It had already gotten to the point that leaving for groceries made him physically uncomfortable, so when Monday came rolling around, he woke early, shaved, covered up the remnants of hematoma littering the corner of his jaw, and went in for orders.

On the plus side of his long hours toiling in his workshop, the suit can now snap a plastic ruler in half without the jaw hatch coming loose. In former trial runs the acrylonitrile butadiene styrene caught in the suit’s teeth, but when he’d quit modifications late last night the thin plastic had snapped clean in half.

Small victories will lead to larger ones in time.

About two weeks after Matthew’s attempt on Dr. Lecter’s life, Randall gets a call.

“Randall Tier,” he answers without bothering to check the caller ID. It’s late enough in his shift that he’s well beyond apathy that he doesn’t care if the Pope himself is calling him for brunch tomorrow. He’s been up and working since dawn, so not much has fazed him all day.

“Hello, I’m returning a call.”

“Consider it returned,” Randall says, choking on his disdain like a drowning man coming up for air.

“Was there something you needed?” Lecter asks, sounding like a cat who’s just gotten the cream and not like a man who was hung from the ceiling and bled like a pig.

Randall swallows and takes a much-needed seat on the stool near the Canis dirus display he’s been working on for the past few days. “I wanted to know if you were okay. Are you?”

“You sound the more distressed of the two of us, Randall.”

Randall grits his teeth. “I’ve been on my feet for sixteen hours.” He only barely holds off on saying, _And you’re an evasive sack of shit_ in favor of, “What’s your excuse?”

“Working on a Saturday? I admire your conviction, as I always have.”

Randall shifts on his stool, restless.

_Evasive._

“Well, I’m glad you could catch a break from your hectic life to return a measly phone call.”

“Actually, I haven’t quite managed a moment’s peace. Presently…” Randall hears the unmistakable sluice of fluids and splattering matter. “I am engaged in dinner preparations.”

“Did you find an ethical butcher for said meal?” Randall asks carefully, attuned to the subtly deflective language one must use to speak about such things with Dr. Lecter, even in person.

“Sadly, no,” Dr. Lecter muses. “My usual preference is out of town. I had to explore other channels.”

A quiet sigh issues from Randall’s mouth, shortly punctuated by a loud yawn.

“Have you eaten?”

The tail end of that glorious yawn catches in Randall’s throat. He sits up straighter and swivels around to check the clock, wincing when his back pops.

“It’s appalling that your superiors have allowed you to work such long hours. I’m sure given your stubbornness you would stay through the night and starve yourself until the following day.”

“It’s not your job to take care of me.”

“No, the only role I play in your life is to plot a path.”

Randall studies the scattered diagrams and cleverly quoted blurbs Kira stuffed into the file she gave him as supplementary to the dire wolf’s restoration. He curls his fingers into a tight fist against his thigh and closes his eyes.

“We have much to discuss, I think,” Hannibal murmurs in that voice he uses when he’s divulging some precious, intimate secret.

Matthew comes to mind then in the various ribbons of memory Randall keeps of him and the time they had together. He thinks about the man and woman with Dr. Lecter in the hospital that day Randall went to see him. He tries to imagine what Matthew was doing when he was disarmed, how it happened, if it hurt, what went through his head when he hit the ground and left that awful stain there depicting a life and a legend and a finite number of fantasies, some of which were Matthew’s only but a few others being shared between the two of them.

It’s occurred to him many times since he heard what happened that Matthew probably thought about him when it all fell apart—about both of them: Randall, and Will Graham.

“Uh,” Randall breathes, pinching the bridge of his nose. His voice is weak but doesn’t tremble. “When? What time?”

“Will you be available in two hours?”

“I’m available now, if that’s better.”

“Certainly,” he says, sounding so annoyingly pleasant and accommodating. “If you don’t mind that I cook for the first part of your visit.”

“You know that I don’t.”

“The front door will be unlocked for you then, in that case.”

“Great,” Randall says flatly.

He tucks his phone into his pocket and shoves the papers cluttering the desk into jagged stacks so that his area at least parodies neatness. The next time he comes in on Monday he’ll fix it and it will look as it should. He swings by Kira’s office to let her know he’s off and leaves the premises without speaking to anyone else.

His next scheduled dose is coming up. He might be able to sneak it in early before he gets to Dr. Lecter’s, but he always feels lousy if he doesn’t take it with food like the label and Josie tell him to. The vial rattles noisily in his pocket, finally where it’s supposed to be but where he wants it the least. It’s not as if Dr. Lecter doesn’t know about his diagnosis or that he’s on medication. He’s just always hated for people to see the proof of it, though the proof that he _isn’t_ taking it is often worse, as corroborated by his ruined—and responsibly discarded—furniture.

Dr. Lecter’s door is unlocked like he said it would be. Randall enters and locks the door behind him out of habit. He stares at the doorknob for a few seconds before deciding it’s the appropriate thing to do and turns toward the kitchen to meet the sight of his host standing in the doorway between the foyer and the dining room.

The house has a faint tint of salt in its atmosphere like that of blood or raw meat. Randall’s mouth waters after it, in spite of not knowing what’s to be fed to him. He stands with his shoulders back and his head tilted back for his exhaustion, which started to catch up with him on the drive over. His hunger caught up with him, too—all those hours he’d spent ignoring the need.

“There you are,” Hannibal says quietly with an appraising look in his eyes that makes Randall ludicrously, agonizingly angry.

“Don’t say that like you’ve been looking for me,” he says with the utmost patience and even a small laugh.

“I was always looking for you,” Hannibal counters, taking a few steps closer but remaining out of arm’s reach. “You will always be the most exquisite example of what I aspire to have in a friend.”

“Always the example,” Randall mumbles around a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that makes him feel like he’s been gut-punched. “And never the specimen itself.”

“Our relationship will always be imbalanced.”

 _But Will Graham gets to be on even ground with you,_ Randall doesn’t say—doesn’t _scream_ for all his antsy, tiresome frustration.

He casually interrupts Randall’s thoughts to say, in the manner of a rhetorical question, “Am I Hannibal in your thoughts, or am I Dr. Lecter?”

“It changes,” Randall answers honestly after reflecting on his behavior critically.

“When, most notably?”

Randall’s eyes skate away from Dr. Lecter’s as another yawn comes creeping up his throat. He suppresses it and stretches his neck instead. He asks, stomach growling, “What did you make?”

“Braised duck.” Randall cracks one eye open and gives Hannibal a judgmental look until he amends, “For tonight’s purposes.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I do,” Dr. Lecter says.

He tips his head and crosses until he’s at Randall’s shoulder. He takes his jacket off him, touching him very little in the process but touching him all the same. Randall slumps once the heavy jacket’s lifted off him but stiffens at the clattering sound of pills in his jacket pocket. Telltale heat blossoms in his face and neck, and he looks away to hide it, swiping the underside of his wrist across his mouth. There’s a tether drifting somewhere in all the static, but he can’t find it.

“Come with me into the kitchen.”

Randall goes and sits at the kitchen island while Dr. Lecter moves around behind him, first washing his hands and then slinging an apron about his neck and tying the strings behind his back. He brings Randall a shining glass of red wine. As he’s been instructed previous times, he takes a long inhale of the overly sweet bouquet before sipping once slowly. The aromatic medley is curved in such a way that suggests depth and opening, which lends a full-bodied warmth to it when it touches his palate. His second inhale reveals to him the luscious notes of fruit and supple earth.

He doesn’t like wine, but he knows this one well. Rather, his nose does. It’s no surprise at all Dr. Lecter picked one Randall would recognize. It’s playful, more so than the gesture has any right to be. He’s goading Randall into casual interaction with him while he cooks.

“Rhône?”

“Yes,” Dr. Lecter confirms, sounding pleased, though he doesn’t turn away from his cutting board.

Ever since their first shared meal together, he’s been deeply fascinated with Randall’s sense of smell—unparalleled with Hannibal’s own, obviously, but still much better than many others’. He’d been disappointed to hear that Randall isn’t overly fond of alcohol, but he hadn’t pressed the issue. He only ever offered and gave abundantly once invited.

That’s how he operates; that’s why no one ever sees him for what he is. It feels so good to be cared for that the knife never hurts until it’s being pulled out.

“That particular bottle is called Deus Ex Machina.”

_God from the machine. Fitting._

Hannibal drives their conversation, subdued and mild mannered as it is. He moves quickly and soundlessly through the kitchen, speaking as softly as the noise he makes with the pans and plates and silverware. Randall doesn’t track the time, but he wakes up with his forehead pillowed on his arm and the wine glass thoughtfully pushed out of reach.

“Did I bore you with talk of my patients?”

“Is that what we were talking about?”

Randall doesn’t remember. Hannibal touches his arm and angles his head toward the dining room where the table is set. He takes Randall’s glass for him and places it before one of two place settings with a fully served and garnished plate. It smells fantastic, regardless of the questionable meat. It’s never been a problem before, not really. He’d only found out the second time they’d had dinner together because there’d been no other reason to lie about veal not being veal or rabbit not being rabbit. Hannibal looked more satisfied than upset when he’d called him out on it, but the fibs about where dinner had come from haven’t stopped.

He’s careful. They all need to be careful—people like them.

Randall waits for Hannibal, and then he starts in. With forced disinterest, he notes that he’s taken to the more informal address now that his penchant for the opposite has since been called out.

The braised meat is almost sweet and on the verge of tangy for its seasoning. It’s also gamy in a familiar kind of way and served with a side dish of meticulously piled blueberries and nectarine wedges. The pairing is slightly off, but the ‘duck’ makes the berries sweeter still, and the wine makes everything warmer and less troubling to look at, though it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Consequently, Randall drinks more of it than perhaps he should, and—

And the Risperdal, fuck.

He skips out of the room while the table is being cleared to take his dose, not bothering to check if he’s been followed. The wine was a bad idea. Risperdal already has a drowsing effect on him, and now he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t pass out on the drive home.

_Would that be lucky? Would it be luckier if I did?_

After the table is cleared and they’ve weathered all the bullshit small talk, Randall follows his lead’s path into the library where the fireplace is in the eventual process of coming to life. The bowl of a large glass filled with apple brandy finds its way into the hollow of his rounded palm. If his pharmaceutical detour was noticed, it’s being ignored now. It doesn’t matter.

“I’m sorry if I worried you,” Randall hears his host say as if from very far away.

He looks up from the fire crackling to life and sees Lecter—Hannibal, Doctor, whoever the hell he wants to be—taking off his suit jacket and carefully undoing his cufflinks. Randall takes a big drink of the brandy, half-wishing this encounter ends with one of them dead because it would be poetic justice. The other half of him wishes for Deus Ex Machina to release Matthew from bondage or to release Randall from his.

“I hadn’t seen you in a while, not since…”

_Not since I kissed you on the mouth and tried to take your clothes off._

“No,” Hannibal finishes when he sees that Randall can’t. “I thought it was the proper thing to do given the circumstances.”

“You mean the ones wherein I pulled you into my house and sexually assaulted you. Those circumstances.”

“This flair of the dramatic, Randall, do you ever tire of it?”

Randall looks at him and squints. “Will you let me know?”

But Hannibal smiles and sits in the armchair next to Randall’s. They’re pushed close together and angled so that their knees brush anytime one of them moves even a muscle. Randall studies that spot where they can touch and then moves his leg a good inch in the opposite direction.

“Freddie Lounds wrote about your attack.”

“I saw that she did.”

“Right, you’re an avid reader, I forgot,” Randall mumbles, swishing the brandy in his glass and watching the amorphous reflections of firelight as they form and break over the unstable surface. “In that photo it looked like you lost a lot of blood.”

“I did.”

Randall stares so hard at the dancing sparks of refracted light that he goes cross-eyed and his head aches dully in between his eyebrows. He lays his palm over his nose and rubs at his supraorbital ridge with his fingertips, knuckles, and what his oldest sister Diana would call the Mounts of Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, and Mercury.

“Where did he cut you?” Randall asks calmly.

“Who?”

“Will Graham,” he says, fighting tooth and nail not to frown no matter how ugly the mention makes him feel.

“He is in a secure facility,” Hannibal contradicts him, though he looks satisfyingly surprised. “You think he was my attacker?”

“I know the orderly’s name that really did it and moreover, which hospital employed him.” Randall shrugs like it means nothing, but it means the world and it hurts even more. “If you think I can’t connect the dots just because the police refuse to, then you don’t know me half as well as you like to believe you do.”

Hannibal watches him for a long few seconds, a thoughtful, curious gleam in his eyes that Randall pretends not to know like the back of his hand because it only makes him feel more alone and more unusual.

It’s a gift Hannibal’s keeping for Will Graham and a gift Randall would have kept for Matthew if their stars had been different…if everything had come up aces instead…if they’d been different people…if they’d been well…if they’d been eviler than Satan himself…

“He opened the veins in my wrists and tied my arms to a plank so that I couldn’t move them. I stood upon a bucket throughout with a rope around my neck and the option to hang or exsanguinate myself.”

Hannibal makes a slow show of rolling up his sleeves carefully, and Randall can immediately make out the angry discoloration of raised skin. The wounds are similar in size and may scar or may not. Randall doesn’t have a preference, but he can’t help but think Matthew would like for there to be scars—painful, hideous, and incriminating. Everything Randall sometimes feels like he is when the inadequacy of his own flesh comes back to him in waves and waves and…waves.

He takes the hand nearest to him into both of his, thinking very little but also very much. His mind runs while the rest of him trudges slowly behind. His nervous system and the correlative physiological responses he would expect to have, dull down. The slide of Lecter’s skin, Randall’s fingers careening along the back of his hand as he cradles the other beneath the back of his wrist, extinguishes something inside him.

In the same way that vinegar will stop a chemical burn, that distant, bewildered, halfway-unpiloted touch settles him. There’s a small rush of vicious anger at the realization and then nothing. It’s a turbulent kind of peace. 

“It was a crucifixion,” Randall whispers, awe, disbelief, and hysteria coloring him. His hands go hot and his throat tickles as if with laughter. He runs just the edge of his thumb parallel to the long edge of the wound. He whispers again, reverently, “You were crucified.”

Hannibal stays very still in an elegant sort of way—not rigid with it how Randall tends to be, but calm. Not a muscle twitches, and not a hair is out of place. Matthew could be like that, too—casually precise, on the side of reckless, but always knowing more than enough to diffuse or intensify any situation as he saw fit. There’s beauty to it—erratic and tempestuous just like Matthew is erratic and tempestuous and just like Randall and Hannibal and probably most especially Will Graham can be.

He presses the pad of his finger to the marred, healing skin and remembers all the spectacular things the hands that rended it could do. There had been calming touches, nourishing ones, and a cherished few that let Randall know he wasn’t quite as alone as he has dreaded being his whole life.

Randall’s distraction shudders at the pulse lashing temperately against his finger. The blanket tranquility swaddling him shivers at the hitch in Hannibal’s breath when he pushes with too much pressure.

_Too hard?_

_Little bit._

His bottom lip trembles and his eyes sting.

“Sorry,” he breathes, taking that hand away but clutching with the one still lodged under Hannibal’s hand.

He can feel a tremor surging in his fingers and shooting up his wrists. When he tries to pull away Hannibal catches his hands and holds them until Randall reluctantly returns his stare. He drops his eyes a moment later. “You were worried,” Hannibal remarks quietly.

Randall _was_ worried. He was worried that Matthew’s scheme would turn out exactly the way it did. It put fear in his heart just as a predator’s roar must terrorize its prey. He worried that he would lose Matthew to a war in which they were both vastly out of their depths and exceedingly, unfairly disposable.

“I was…” Randall bites his lip. “I was…”

He thinks of Matthew and how he would capitalize on this moment, this shared experience that is one thing but entirely another. When Randall was trying to talk Matthew out of his idiot’s “mission” he’d said something along the lines of expectation as it duels with a person’s perception of reality.

_Do not ever make the mistake of thinking that you know something he doesn’t already plan for you to know. When you underestimate him, he kills you._

Call him fatalistic, but the idea of death doesn’t sting as much as it did.

“They found me in time,” Hannibal soothes him—donning the informal address in his moment of tenderness.

Randall takes a deep breath, feeling his way the way he’s seen Matthew do it. “How did they do it? Graham have a change of heart?”

Hannibal smiles at the hateful tone with which Randall speaks Will Graham’s name, but he shakes his head. “No, a mutual colleague found out from another patient at the hospital. He knew of Will’s involvement with Matthew Brown and what they had planned together.”

“Are they charging both of them with attempted murder?”

“Will hasn’t confessed to as much, and Matthew Brown refuses to speak on the matter entirely.”

Randall drops his gaze and thinks. “Have you spoken to the inmate that tipped off your colleague?”

“Why would I?” Hannibal asks, and now Randall is actively thinking of him as Hannibal and not Dr. Lecter.

“I’m betting he knew sooner than he told.”

“Do you mean to say he allowed for my apprehension to continue longer than was necessary?”

“Yes.”

Hannibal doesn’t look upset or wounded at the thought, but Randall can see him considering it with slowly building cunning. As often as they have had their differences, Randall has never wanted to be on the wrong side of that blade. He doesn’t doubt that he will be someday, but for now, the axe is tipping toward someone else entirely.

“I don’t suppose you’d retaliate against Will Graham,” Randall says slowly, letting poisonous anger seep into his voice. His words bear all the promise of furious retribution. 

“What else would you have me do to him? He is imprisoned.”

“He’s imprisoned,” Randall repeats flatly. “And he nearly succeeded in having you killed.”

A neat little wrinkle settles in at the corner of Hannibal’s mouth. Randall flicks his gaze away from it, irritated at himself for noticing.

“What would you have me do, Randall?”

Randall’s shoulders tense and his eyes close at the way his name slips off Hannibal’s voice all warm and familiar like it belongs there on his lips. It’s ridiculous. He’s going to get himself killed just as surely as Matthew went and got himself detained. This whole thing is a mess and he can’t even begin to look for the way out.

“I wouldn’t have you do anything, _Doctor_ , but you know damn well that if I’d been the one to get away you’d be driving the hell out of me to get back at the one responsible.”

“Are you attempting to drive me?” he asks softly, openly.

And because he’s never been one for subtlety and because he actually welcomes some violence on his body with the way he feels right now, he sighs blusterously and admits, “ _Yes_.”

The tension unexpectedly drops out. He’d been braced for hell, and instead Hannibal’s just staring at him almost smiling. There’s a look on his face that’s every bit as befuddling as it is beautiful and heartbreaking—it says that while he knows Randall didn’t hang the moon, he’s done something equally charming and admirable. “Abel Gideon,” he murmurs.

Randall recalls the name from the newspapers and from a conversation he had with Matthew their first night together. His mouth falls open before he has words prepared, but he manages to string together a statement: “Sounds like he had a grudge.”

“I suspect he did.”

Hannibal stares at him then, eyes soft and critical of something in Randall’s face that he’s forgotten to repress and can’t remember how to rescind. Randall blinks and allows his eyelids to stutter and remain half-closed. 

“How do you always get me so drunk?” he mumbles, rubbing his hand too hard over his face as if he can’t feel it.

It’s a deflection. He hopes Hannibal believes it, but there’s no way to tell since he only says, “You use alcohol for a coping mechanism—a numbing agent.”

“And everything hurts too much otherwise,” Randall agrees. “Sound psychology, Doctor. Just foot me the bill.”

He stands to his feet and sways, ready to stagger out of the house and walk home, but Hannibal rises, too. Randall turns halfway to him out of instinct.

“Where are you on the suit?”

His swallow sticks in his throat and his teeth click in his mouth. Hannibal smiles, and Randall’s heart pounds in his chest.

“Why?”

“Your work holds your attention like little else ever can. In times of great stress I’ve known you to create projects for yourself—dismantling and building small machines, modifying the neighbor’s car, and the one incident wherein you broke into the main office at your high school and stole the teeth from the stuffed lion on display.”

Randall blinks. There goes his fixation with teeth, again.

“If I recall correctly you meant to combine them with the skull of a bull your parents kept in the den of your childhood home.”

“And what were your obsessions, Hannibal?” he hesitates on the last syllable of the informally spoken name only once he realizes the implications.

Hannibal just watches him, not reacting to either the gesture or the self-consciousness attached to it. For a moment Randall thinks he sees his eyes cloud over and spool back through his memory for a distant, complicated past. He murmurs, “I had quite a fondness for blood.

“It led me to discover a great many things about myself that I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“You would have,” Randall drawls back, feeling some of that stupid bravery he associates with alcohol consumption. “All roads lead to the same destination.”

“Do they?”

“Don’t they?”

Hannibal follows Randall to the door after a drawn out pause wherein Randall nearly dozes off with his back to the wall. The former takes his keys and coat, not bothering to explain when Randall doesn’t bother to ask what he means to do. He just shrugs his own coat on and trudges out to Hannibal’s car with its sleek interior and huge backseat.

He has half a mind to crawl back there and curl up on the seats, letting himself fall asleep or vomit as his body wills. Rigidly, he buckles up and presses his head back into the awkwardly angled headrest, counting up to a hundred and then back down until the car stops.

Hannibal follows him to the door of his house. He says, “I would see the suit, if your mind isn’t set against it.”

Randall spares him a vaguely wild glance and doesn’t say anything. He jabs his key at the door and sags against it when Hannibal extracts his keys from his hand, making no attempt to moderate how much his skin passes over Randall’s. The lock disengages with a thunderous slide of metal against metal. Randall breathes evenly in and out, body still collapsed against the door. Hannibal slides his palm over the back of his neck and scrunches his fingers briefly in Randall’s hair.

“Come along then, Randall.”

He gathers himself up, knees feeling fit to buckle but holding fast. “Right.”

“I’ll leave if that is your wish.”

It’s really, really not, and Randall wants to die upon realizing the fact of his complicity. He’s a traitor.

Strangled, Randall says, “No, stay.”

They go inside, and Randall makes a beeline for the workshop. Hannibal hangs back but joins him eventually, making an offhanded comment about the empty state of his living room while Randall moves around too much in the usually comfortable, easy space in which his element can flourish. He decides to be honest: “Yeah, I had an episode.”

“When?”

“Two weeks ago, I guess.”

Hannibal’s mouth puckers like he just bit into a lemon, and Randall rolls his eyes. “Don’t flatter yourself. I went off my medication. It was a mistake.”

“Why were you off your medication?”

Randall doesn’t answer but carefully unveils the wolf’s skull that is and will forever be his masterpiece. The argument clearly starting to begin on Hannibal’s lips drops off. He studies the headpiece as he takes a few steps closer for a better look. He whispers, “Magnificent.”

“Wait,” Randall says softly, moving away to retrieve a length of rounded wood, thicker than the plastic and harder to snap in half with his own bare hands. It isn’t the final test, but it’s one he knows the teeth can conquer where they stand with the present modifications. He holds it out and then reconsiders, offering it to Hannibal, who takes it with a pleased almost-smile on his mouth as Randall instructs him, “Between the teeth.”

Hannibal holds it as directed without letting go, shoulders rising with a satisfied, perhaps shocked inhale when Randall triggers the biting mechanism. The length of wood snaps clean in half just as Randall knew it would. His jaw aches for lack of a closer connection to the abrupt violence of it. A smile must suffice, which he points at Hannibal, eyes dropping to the severed rod still held firmly in his hand. Hannibal returns his smile, wide and open and proud. It makes Randall’s chest hurt and his smile drop from his face, gone as quickly as it came. He busies his hands by unsticking the jaw so it returns to resting, slack position.

The smile on Hannibal’s face doesn’t waver. He says, “Aren’t you spectacular.”

Randall chews on his lip and brushes a sliver of wood from between two ominous, lovely canines. The detritus flutters to the floor at his feet. “You don’t have to do that.”

There’s a mechanical whir and the empty clack of bone easing against bone. Randall pulls his hand away and a long line of red runs down from the protuberance of his knuckle over the back of his hand and over his wrist. One of the teeth nicked him and broke the skin. He turns a dull, annoyed look on his impish former doctor.

The cheeky son of a bitch is smiling at him.

Randall is about to yell at him for touching his work but notices Hannibal’s eyes dropping to follow the blood crawling in a single rivulet down Randall’s forearm. He reaches out to catch it before the color can stain the wrinkled fabric of Randall’s rolled up sleeve.

He holds that finger to his lips. Randall’s stomach drops just about through the floor.

 _You absolute fucker,_ Randall thinks, worried for his sanity that he might be imagining this.

“You inquired as to my obsession,” Hannibal says innocently enough.

Randall rolls his eyes. “I sort of got what it was when you _told me_.”

Hannibal leers at him for a moment more and appears to make a decision about what the rest of their night will be. He asks Randall to see him out, and just like that, he’s gone and Randall’s standing in his empty doorway bleeding.

Randall doesn’t expect to hear back from Hannibal that same weekend. He calls him over for an impromptu and uncharacteristically late dinner, and Randall accepts, not knowing how else to react. Hannibal greets him cordially at the door, taking his coat and spouting pleasantries that Randall merely returns with confused monosyllables.

His smile is warm and sated like Randall showing up like he said he would was all he needed to complete his night. That’s the only part of him that _is_ calm or remotely happy-looking. His shoulders are drawn up, not tense but poised for action. Those are enough to tint Randall’s demeanor with wariness, but it’s the dangerous flash of something near to madness in Hannibal’s eyes that puts uncertain, tangled fear in his belly.

“What is it?” he asks quietly, risking a glance to Hannibal’s left.

“Please join me in the dining room.”

They walk together, Hannibal slowing his pace to match Randall’s tentative stride. He skids to a stop at the sight of none other than Abel Gideon at the head of the table, sitting upright and hooked up to a single IV bag.

“Abel, this is Randall. It was his idea that I invite you for dinner tonight.”

“My most esteemed thanks,” Abel says through gritted teeth with faux pleasance in his tone.

Randall blinks once, twice, and comes to stand more fully in the room. Quiet rage builds in his chest and rests there right behind his sternum. “I was eager to meet the person who saved his life.”

“A strange way to repay such a favor, I would think.”

Hannibal brushes past Randall to slip into the kitchen. “On the contrary,” Randall muses, coming around to sit in the free place setting across from Hannibal and to Abel Gideon’s left. “This is how we repay Will Graham.” Chidingly, he says, “It’s not all about you, _Abel_.”

Gideon makes to retort but goes very still at the sight of Hannibal coming back into the room with a tray of something oddly encased in what looks to be clay. Hannibal announces the name of the dish as he explains the purpose and aesthetic behind the method. Once the meat is freed from its shell he turns to Gideon with glinting cutlery and asks, pointedly, “Shall I carve?”

Gideon’s lips pull back into a disgusted grimace, and something like dread eases into being in Randall’s stomach again. He says, “I think you already have.”

Hannibal locks eyes with Randall at the admission as if to say, _What did you **think** I was going to do? _

Randall scoots his chair back and slowly lifts the tablecloth before bending to look, and sure enough.

One of Gideon’s legs is missing.

He wants to puke, but he also really wants to laugh.

And laugh.

He sits back up, rather composed, he thinks, and graciously accepts his portion when Hannibal daintily drops it onto his plate. Hannibal serves himself last. They wait in unspoken agreement for Gideon to take the first bite. Randall wishes he could take a picture and get it to Matthew someway, somehow.

Randall makes himself scarce, fatted enough on Gideon’s humiliation and total subjugation for gloating to be wholly unnecessary. Sometimes they talk around him, and only once does Gideon attempt to engage Randall.

“So it was your call—this macabre feast. Might I ask why?”

“Because you’re all Will Graham has to make his story stick.” Randall gives his glance over for perusal and revels at how deeply Gideon wishes he were of a different, more persuadable temperament. “Because hurting you is an expedient way of teaching him that if he’s not careful—” Randall enunciates, raising a forkful of meat to his lips but not bringing it into his mouth, “—everyone he knows is going to end up paying the price _for_ him.”

Hannibal’s eyes are softer when Randall looks at him. Gideon frowns hopelessly at his plate.

“Mr. Brown I would understand,” Gideon says a while later when half of Hannibal’s glass is drained and Randall’s remains untouched.

His knife scrapes his plate. While Gideon doesn’t appear to notice, Hannibal does look at him, one minutely arched eyebrow expressing confusion.

“Me, though? I’m just the messenger. I _like_ screwing with Chilton. I get a kick out of…” Gideon makes a noise in the back of his throat. “Well, I don’t kick, but I threw Crawford off your scent. I _discredited_ him.”

“Because you enjoy games, Abel? Or because you would see Chilton imprisoned?”

“Both,” he answers like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Randall pushes the last of his food around on his plate and takes a long drink of his wine, finally. It’s the wrong move. Hannibal tracks the motion with his eyes, and although he says nothing, Randall knows he’s caught. Like a fly in a trap, he is caught.

After dinner, he waits in the kitchen washing the dishes while Hannibal takes Gideon down to the basement. Halfway through his workload he feels eyes on him but merely continues with the washing until he’s finished and all that’s left is to dry his hands. He turns as he does, and there Hannibal stands before him with curiosity burning in his eyes. Nothing about him smiles, but he is relaxed enough, given the circumstances.

“Did you know him?”

Randall doesn’t ask who Hannibal means; he just nods yes.

“Tell me that you did. Use your words,” he fires back, voice deceptively calm but demanding truth.

“I met him about a week before he attacked you.”

Hannibal folds his arms over his chest. “Did you know what he meant to do?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Hannibal repeats, a vicious smile curving his lips at the corners. “Was the crucifixion your idea, Randall?”

“I told him to make it quick,” Randall replies contrarily. “I _warned_ him.”

Calm as the lull before a storm, Hannibal says, “He would have done well to listen to you.”

“He has that in common with Will Graham.”

They study each other, at an impasse. Randall has knives at his back, but Hannibal has the way out at his.

“When will the suit be finished?” he asks when the silence between them has become unbearable.

“A month. Maybe two.”

“I will call on you when that time comes.”

Randall smirks, unafraid and brazen for the fact. “For what?”

“In a month’s time, maybe two, Will Graham will be walk out of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane a free man.” He takes three measured steps closer. His voice drops low so that it rumbles in his chest. “When I call on you, you will do that which you aspired to do anyway.”

Hannibal takes another step closer, and Randall’s question dies on the tip of his tongue.

“Do you understand me, Randall?”

“Kill him,” he breathes.

Hannibal gifts him with a smile, cruel and chilling and strangely, shatteringly disappointed. “Kill him, Randall.”

Barely even registering the soft hand cradling his cheek, he asks, “Why?”

“Quid pro quo.”

At first he’s bewildered, but he abandons that impression for clarity. Will sent Matthew after Hannibal, so Hannibal will send Randall after Will. Turnabout is fair play. Of course it is. It takes so very little for the axe to swing a different way. Hannibal’s unarmed, but Randall feels as if there is a blade held to his throat all the same. 

“Do you want me to succeed?”

Hannibal pauses and drops his hand. “I don’t know yet.”

Randall is sober and wide awake when he drives himself home that night. His skin buzzes with purpose and intent, and he’s so alive with the thrill of it that he forgets to mourn his second fall out of Hannibal’s favor.

Dr. Lecter’s, that is.

A month, almost two later, he finds himself at the Chesapeake Detention Facility, formerly MCAC.

Will Graham was released just a few days ago.

Matthew’s unshaven and disorderly when Randall sits down on the other side of the glass from him. It takes him a moment, but he does raise the phone to his ear. Randall follows his lead.

“You look rough,” he says instead of, _I miss you. You’re an idiot. I want to hate you, but I can’t._

A tired smile flickers over Matthew’s face. “You don’t. Thanks, though. Rough is a good thing in here.”

“Has anybody given you problems?”

“Mm,” he hedges. “At first. Not so much now. It starts out as hell, and then it gets better. And then you remember, and you’re back in hell again.”

Randall tries to smile but it doesn’t come easy.

“Don’t frown. You’ll give yourself wrinkles.”

 _I’m not going to live long enough for that to matter,_ he doesn’t say. Matthew seems to hear it anyway. His gaze falls to the table on his side of the glass and then to the table on Randall’s side. It stays there.

“Should have quit while I was ahead,” he mumbles, closing his eyes and passing his hand over his eyes. They’re dry when he looks up at Randall. “You wanted me just as I was, didn’t you?”

Randall clenches his teeth together and looks away, losing his breath. “I did.”

Matthew nods slowly and leans his forehead against his hand, eyes tracking along Randall’s features and the rest of him that he can see. In a strained voice, he says, “I guess that doesn’t mean anything now?”

Randall licks his lips and closes his hand in an agitated fist. Matthew’s eyebrows twitch down once, and he sits up straighter. His mouth falls open, and Randall hears him suck in a surprised breath of air. He whispers, and Randall almost misses it, “You finished it.”

And Randall loses his breath again because Matthew should have been the one to see the suit in its completed glory, not Lecter when it was still a fledgling creation only capable of small feats of fancy.

He nods once, and a genuine smile overtakes Matthew’s mouth. His eyes instantly look glassy.

“You finished it,” he mouth to himself, covering his eyes with his hand. “Randall.”

“I know,” he answers softly, and after waiting for what feels like a long time, he adds, quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“No.” Matthew removes his hand from his face, the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks smattered with moisture. “Don’t ever apologize for that, not to me or to anyone else.”

He lets himself be warmed by Matthew’s ferocious pride and faith in him. His happiness is intoxicating, so Randall allows the swelling sensation in his heart to rule him and says, “I did it.”

Matthew beams. “You did.”

They know how it’ll end—how it _has_ to end. Maybe this visit won’t be their last, but it is _among_ the last. Whatever Randall predicts for what his confrontation with Will Graham will be, he doesn’t expect the authorities to let him live for long. Dr. Lecter will sell him out, or the damningly unique nature of Randall’s modus operandi will give him away.

Matthew schools his expression like the thought has just occurred to him, too. He takes an even, deep breath.

“I would have liked this,” he says significantly. “I would have had this instead of…what we thought we wanted.”

Defensive for no reason other than because it lets him focus the pain elsewhere, Randall argues with him. “I do want this.”

Temperately, understanding him, Matthew just says, “I know you do.”

He doesn’t know how to push on from here. The end is easy to see, even now, but getting there leaves Randall a whole lot of room for improvisation. Looking at Matthew feels like the right thing to do while it’s still an option for him.

Later, when the last thing he sees is Will Graham’s face spattered with his blood, he’ll remember wondering if Matthew thought about him as he was going down. And he’ll think to himself as it all goes black that he should have asked, though he believes Matthew did think of him, then and often.

All roads lead to the same destination. Maybe they’ll meet there someday, but maybe not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Braised Duck  
> http://afamily.vn/an-ngon/thit-vit-om-kieu-tau-2011102412192328.chn
> 
> Blueberry, Nectarine, and Shiso Salad  
> http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Blueberry-Nectarine-and-Shiso-Salad
> 
> Clos Saint-Jean Deus Ex Machina Chateauneuf-du-Pape 2006  
> http://www.wine.com/v6/Clos-Saint-Jean-Deus-Ex-Machina-Chateauneuf-du-Pape-2006/wine/131667/Detail.aspx
> 
>  
> 
> **Lol the first version I posted of this chapter had "there" for "their" near the end. I'm so sorry I fail at life. -hangs head in shame and misery-


	4. When the Levee Breaks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matthew reflects on all that’s happened, but he isn’t the only one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _All last night, sat on the levee and moaned / All last night, sat on the levee and moaned / Thinking ‘bout my baby and my happy home_

Randall’s gone for a week. He doesn’t visit or write. Matthew receives no word of confirmation, but the sinking feeling in his gut tells him well enough what’s happened.

He’s torn about how to feel. The closest emotion he can identify is grief, but there’s also anger and wonder. Randall just did what he had to do, same as Matthew. His punishment, Matthew can only assume, will have been more final than prison but perhaps more liberating depending on perspective.

Matthew can guess what Randall’s perspective was. If thinking about it makes him a little crazy—if it breaks his heart—

But it doesn’t.

He told Randall he would have liked him for an alternative because maybe hearing that would have changed his mind about going to his death the way Matthew had gone to a jail cell. That’s all it was. That’s the extent of it. There’s nothing deeper; nothing substantial rests beneath the ache. It’s in his head. It’s in the pills they’re giving him and in the water. It’s in the snow.

It’s in his fucking skin, goddamn it.

“Hey, Brown, you all right?”

“What?” he mumbles, half-glancing up from his untouched tray of food to meet the gaze of his cellmate.

Ephraim squints at him and then repeats his question. Matthew blinks at the plastic spork in his fingers, remembering his kitchen and thinking about how Randall likes ham, carrots, bell peppers, and spinach but not lamb or curry.

“I’m fine,” he lies.

Fittingly, Ephraim doesn’t buy it. He glances down at Matthew’s tray pointedly and then back up at his face. Matthew flicks the spork next to the green beans and slides the tray over, bored. Ephraim watches him for a second, maybe trying to gauge whether Matthew is baiting him. Something about Matthew’s passive demeanor must tip him off because he’s eating merrily off the tray before Matthew can think of anything halfway clever to say.

Ephraim is what might be considered ugly by some people, though he means well and helps where he can. His face is littered with pockmarks and a few dermatologically diverse scars. He told Matthew the one in his cheek is from an old girlfriend stabbing him with a butter knife. It’s not too outlandish so much as it is the right kind of mundane—the believable kind. He gives details when asked, and they always stay the same: the girlfriend’s name was Catalina, she went to community college, she worked three jobs for her degree, and ‘fuck you, Matthew,’ she wasn’t stupid.

He said she was the smartest person he’d ever known on the outside, and ‘Hey,’ Ephraim told him, ‘I deserved getting a fuckin’ butter knife in the face. That’s not a mark against her intelligence. I’m the stupid one. _I_ ended up in jail, right?’

Matthew watches Ephraim eat his food, and the noise in his mind rages then settles, rages then settles.

“What’s Catalina doing now?” he asks, waiting patiently for Ephraim to acknowledge the question in between bites.

“Kid, last I saw her was six years ago. If there’s any hope for the world we live in, she’s manager of some ritzy business or working her way up in a company. I don’t know. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to.”

“You’re right.”

Matthew takes Ephraim’s tray as soon as he’s done with it, dumps it, and walks purposefully to the front of the cafeteria. He attacks a guard called Silva for no other reason than because it means they’ll put him in solitary confinement. A fight with another inmate might secure him that small vacation, but there’s no assurance he’ll end up where he wants to be. Attacking a guard, though—there are always a good four or five people ready to jump in at the first sight of someone else initiating a coup, and when the prisoners are riled, someone’s likely to be severely punished.

Striking Silva over the back of his head with an empty tray isn’t a coup by any means, but they take what they can get just as Matthew takes whatever _he_ can get. Silva’s a lanky guy, and he goes down to his knees from the blow alone. The tray’s not heavy. Matthew just swung hard enough to crack the plastic and he caught Silva with his defenses down. It’s a bit unfair if he’s honest. He’s been listening to the other guards. Silva’s got a crisis at home with his two year-old. He doesn’t need emotionally imbalanced miscreants bludgeoning him with kitchenware.

_And then what’d I do, Randall?_

The other guards in the room already have stun guns pointed at various parts of Matthew’s body. It doesn’t matter. He drops his makeshift weapon. It was in bad taste.

_Tell me you didn’t hit him over the head._

He wonders as they haul him off for confinement how Randall would fare in prison. Would his experience be anything like Matthew’s? Hellish at first and then easier as the days dragged on; would the other inmates bloody him up and cover him in bruises the way they had with Matthew?

Silence calms him. Granted, he might feel better with a sedative or two slinking through his system. He doesn’t put up enough of a fight to fool them into thinking he needs one. If he asks politely, they’ll think he’s a drug addict.

It’s a paradox.

Time is unmeasured in the below-rooms. Noise is muffled. Seasons are nullified. Senses are dulled.

His sleep schedule is aggravated by the fracturing of minutes, hours, and seconds. He dreams of a mechanism in the shape of an upright bear with rows of blades for teeth and a hydraulic jaw. He dreams that inside the bear’s steam-hissing mouth he can see spokes of light reflected in a pair of human eyes. He dreams that Randall is there, solidly there, aware of him and looking back.

Matthew dreams that Randall found a life in death, though it’s a life of language Matthew can’t hear or speak. It’s a life of breath Matthew can’t fathom, can’t see, can’t touch.

It hurts.

But it won’t hurt Randall, not anymore.

It snows for three days after they left him out of confinement. Uninterrupted, the days freeze over and the hours drag on. Ephraim tells him he looks like death.

Maybe that’s why he can’t breathe or speak or feel much of anything. Maybe he is dead, and the kind of life he needs is incompatible with what he can feasibly access, here or anywhere, with anyone. Maybe Randall hated his skin because it _was_ wrong, just like he said. Matthew heard him, but he hadn’t been listening.

Why didn’t he listen?

It’s especially awful and cold outside when the guards let the inmates out for exercise. Matthew’s in general population. His crimes weren’t dreadful enough to claim him a place in maximum security. Perhaps he should be grateful. Part of him is incensed on account of his pride. Hannibal Lecter would get maximum security. Will Graham landed in a psychiatric hospital.

What’s so special about them that isn’t reflected in Matthew’s own psychosis, he’d like to know.

It’s not as if Matthew can ask the counselors or the people in charge of his sentence. They don’t give a shit what happens to him. They don’t want to discuss murder and form with him. They don’t get it. They can’t.

Matthew provokes a huge guy called Nelson on the basketball court. It takes a while, but he succeeds in having himself pinned on the blacktop while three of his fingers bent in unnatural angles. Nelson lets him up after a minute when the guards alert to their situation, but by the time they come to investigate, the two of them are up on their feet and Matthew’s misshapen fingers are tucked away behind his back.

The deluge of adrenaline leaving his body and slow, sweet pain wafting over him in waves is pure, unadulterated delight. Nelson drags him off the court toward a chain link fence and stares at Matthew until he returns his look.

“If you have a death wish, I just wanted to let you know you’re going about it the wrong way,” he deadpans.

Matthew bites back a grimace, telling himself that sneering at someone who would rather talk civilly than beat him to a pulp is childish. Nelson’s right anyway. He’s right about all of it.

“Now look, you haven’t been here long. Brown, right? Matthew?”

“Yeah,” Matthew mutters, looking away and peering through the gaps in the looped metal of the fence.

“I need you to hear what I’m saying. You listening? Fish,” he says, slapping Matthew to get his attention. “I ain’t a goddamn counselor, all right? I’m not gonna knock you around every time you get stressed out and can’t risk taking it out on the guards like you did on Monday. You mess around with guys based on how they look, they’re not all gonna pull you aside and give you the real on this shit. Keep it up, you’ll fuck with the wrong guy and get yourself killed—or you’ll wish you had. Get it?”

“I’m starting to,” Matthew murmurs, fluttering his fingers for a few seconds to check the damage. A sharp burning pain shoots down his thumb, his forefinger, and his ring finger.

“Oh, man.” Nelson hisses through his teeth. “No bullshit, Brown, you should go see the doc about them digits.”

“Not a bad idea.” He looks at Nelson, awkward for having been put on the spot and not knowing how to return kindness in here. “It says in my file that I’m self-harming. He’ll believe I did it to myself.”

Nelson’s expression blanks like he hadn’t even thought about it.

“Well, you go do you. Keep your head on your shoulders. I mean it.”

Matthew doesn’t have to tell Dr. Hallowell anything as it turns out. He didn’t expect that he would ask how his fingers came to be broken. It just seemed like the only thing to say to Nelson in the moment. He supposes he could have thanked him, but that would have felt worse.

There are three splints on his hand and a larger brace around his wrist. Apparently he sprained it when Nelson subdued him. Go figure he can’t handle heavy contact.

Belatedly Matthew has a thought of rugby. Randall let it slip once that he played. Matthew never saw the proof of it, of course. They hadn’t had enough time to learn the small things. They made do with the big things—the things kept hidden in plain sight, but hidden all the same.

Matthew doesn’t sleep that night. Ephraim notices his eyes open and tries to get him to talk about it, but someone in the next cell complains at the noise. Matthew just turns onto his side and closes his eyes. It doesn’t help him sleep. It doesn’t help or fix or undo anything. He’s here. Randall is somewhere out there or he’s nowhere, and not a single person in the world has even considered telling Matthew what’s happened to him. He’s helpless. They had their stolen glimpse of happiness-of a life shared and revered amongst each other.

They had their shot. Randall gave him so many chances. He asked him not to do this stupid thing that he did, and when push came to shove and it came time for Randall to meet his transformation head-on, Matthew wasn’t there for him.

Selfish, arrogant prick.

Lowlife.

Matthew blinks and the sun is rising. The guards are opening the cell doors. Inmates are sitting down to breakfast. He doesn’t look at the guards or at Ephraim. He doesn’t acknowledge Nelson looking at him from across the cafeteria, not even when Ephraim says in a stage whisper, “Think he might still be mad about yesterday?”

Nelson isn’t, and it’s enough that Matthew knows. He only needs so many reminders of how trapped he is inside this place, inside of himself.

At four o’ clock Silva tells him he has a visitor.

Matthew’s heart races stupidly in his chest, denying the unlikelihood that it could be Randall waiting to see him—that they might have one more goodbye in store before this maddening loneliness truly and definitely becomes the default. Before things go back to the way they were when Matthew was alone with only a false mentor in Will Graham, deluding himself into believing it could be enough to satisfy him. Before the world closes on this window of hope that says maybe, _maybe_ Randall lives. _Maybe_ he can go on existing as the necessarily flawed human being that he is, even if Matthew still never witnesses the engineered proof of his perfection as beast.

He holds his breath and walks to the long row of chairs aligned with telephones. When he nears the shatterproof glass and sees who’s come to call on him, Matthew’s legs nearly fall out from under him. Silva grabs his arm and calls his name, distrustful for obvious reasons but also suspicious of Matthew’s unwillingness to go forward. 

Will Graham rises on his side of the glass, expression blank but speaking volumes. His stance is relaxed but his hands are planted firmly on the table. He came here to talk business. He came here to destroy Matthew’s fantasy. He came here to give him closure. It’s cruelty and decency wrapped together in one. 

The only way Will would even know to connect Randall with Matthew is if Lecter got wind of it and tipped him off. They’d been discussing them.

Good.

Even if they were peripheral freak shows at best to the main event of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter’s murder circus, they were there. They _happened_. 

And now Will is here staring him down. There’s a closed file on the table in front of him. Matthew forces his feet to move. Randall deserves to have been known and appreciated in his efforts and in his subsequent death. He deserves for Matthew to claim him when he doubts Lecter made any attempt at all to do so.

He sucks in a deep breath and squares his shoulders. He moves forward to meet the look that Will is still giving him.

_Come and face me._

_Face what you’ve done._

Matthew’s learned his lesson by now. It’s not about what he’s done. It’s about what Randall did, what Will and Lecter did, and how they’ll lie to say Randall was a monster and deserved to die when they’re the real monsters—when Randall needed a suit to realize his monstrosity while they all wore theirs on their faces and their hands. 

He sits at the same time that Will does and drums his good fingers on the table for a few seconds before picking up the phone.

“Just couldn’t stay away,” he tries to tease. His voice comes out scratchy and too flat to carry humor.

“You know why I’m here.”

Stiffly, Matthew replies, “Yes, I do.”

Will taps one finger over the tab on the manila folder and looks up at Matthew. He doesn’t look like he’s aiming to be coquettish. It must just be the way his eyes are—too bright, an ambiguous flux of blue, gray, and green. 

“You changed your hair,” Matthew says when Will continues to stare at him.

“I did.”

Matthew leans in, crooning into the phone, “And how does Master like this look on you?”

Will’s expression doesn’t change or flicker. Matthew isn’t surprised and his dark sense of humor isn’t lessened. He’s come to expect Will to give him cryptic answers and flat expressions. Before he met Randall, his study of Will Graham was comprehensive, or so Matthew would have thought. Such as things are, the wet blanket that is Will Graham does not sour his false cheer; it doesn’t settle the constant fear or dread in his chest either.

“What happened to your fingers?”

“Physical pain released endorphins,” Matthew answers, using a clinically detached voice. He waves his splinted fingers at Will for emphasis. “I picked a fight in the yard so that I could have endorphins.”

“Have you been depressed?”

The traffic in Matthew’s mind comes to a sickening halt. He feels himself lurch with it.

In a smaller voice than he would like, with all of his bravado gone, Matthew says, “I know why you’re here.”

Will holds his eyes, and he looks like he’s trying to decipher a code from the very slight break in Matthew’s admission. He would be right not to believe in Matthew’s affection for Randall; Matthew spends the better part of his waking hours denying he has any such feelings.

But there he goes: owning up to denial. Matthew looks down at his fingers and then at the table.

“I’ve known for about a week now that he wouldn’t come back.”

“Dr. Lecter was right.”

Matthew hears Randall’s voice in his head.

 _Do not ever make the mistake of thinking that you know something he doesn’t already plan for you to know. When you underestimate him, he kills you._  
“He usually is,” he sighs, irritated. “Are you only just figuring that out?”

“I’m only just beginning to see you in a new light,” Will counters. “If you’d gotten away and if Dr. Lecter hadn’t made it, what would your plan for me have been?”

Matthew raises his eyebrows.

“Have me some threesome.”

Will rolls his eyes, but there’s a red flush creeping up the side of his neck that Matthew hates himself for noticing.

“I have a hard time believing—”

“That’s it right there. Makings of a beautiful union between three people.”

Will opens the file, and Matthew shuts his mouth. His gaze drops unwillingly to the photos. He searches out the eyes without really knowing that he means to and finds them glazed over, pointed at something beyond the camera flash. It’s an excellent quality photograph. The savagery of the artistry is something Matthew can only barely begin to comprehend. On the one hand, the slow build of horror up the back of his neck retreating into his hairline is something he can’t repress or tamp down.

On the other, he’d seen this already in his dream. He’d seen teeth and darkness and the intelligent shine of eyes in the black. It’s just been made tangible in the photograph. It’s been realized. Randall has fused his skin with the body and power of beast.

Will did this for Randall. He did it _for_ him.

Randall attacked Will like Matthew pestered Nelson on the court. He goaded him into a response. He received this as a _reward_.

“Endorphins,” he whispers.

As if he understands that Matthew’s made the connection, Will slides that photograph away for one taken from a different angle. He slides that one away to reveal the mauled and brutalized corpse of a human being. He slides that one away for pictures of dismembered, gutted people frozen in the snow: succulent ribbons of blood captured against white, white snow.

It’s so apt.

All the while Matthew absorbs these in silent awe, he remembers the sight of Randall’s face dappled in dark blood fitted over a skull not his own, but so very _much_ what he needed. It resurfaces in negative colors over the blood-mottled snow—Randall’s eyes, listless one second and then sliding to his the next, alert, awake, _alive_ , at last.

Will reaches the last photograph and holds it up against the glass for Matthew to see it clearly. His lips part around a gasp.

Hanging from the beams of a tall structure by thick iron chains, illuminated by dawn or by dusk, and enthroned in tiny granules of dust is an apparatus of bone and what looks to be either metal or leather…

It’s the suit. It’s Randall’s suit.

Matthew unthinkingly reaches for it and blinks when his knuckles bump the glass, mumbles, “Oh.”

He sniffles once and raises that hand to his face. Tears cling to the pads of his fingers and to the back of his hand when he runs it across his cheek to catch the rest. He doesn’t look at Will.

For a long time he can’t speak.

Rationally, as someone who knew Randall intimately, he understands that what was done to him was beautiful. Perhaps its very nature as something terrible and violent to the sight is what makes it beautiful by a definition Randall would accept. 

As if it will keep him from screaming his misery, Matthew grows jealous like a storm materializing out of nowhere. He buries it, but it is his primary emotion. At least until Will leaves, jealousy is all he will allow himself to feel.

“How did you know this is what we wanted?” he asks at flatly as he can.

“This is what he needed. The killings were almost incidental. He used them as a means to an end.”

Matthew nods, swallowing down the great many gnarled words that bubble inside of him at how inanely simple Will makes it sound, whether he means to or not. He saw Randall, he killed him to give him what he needed—what Matthew would never have granted him, and all he has to say of his mind, of the body he rent to pieces, of the life he took is that it was a means to an end.

“That’s all any of us are to you, isn’t it?” Matthew muses, feeling char and ash in his heart and ice in his veins. “Means to an end—not even people.”

“Does that bother you?” Will asks, challenging him with his eyes more than the question. “That I understood him better than you ever can?”

Matthew represses his instinct to snarl and instead calmly asks, “Does it bother you?”

He hangs up the phone and signals Silva to come get him. Will Graham has nothing left for him. Matthew has his endorphins, and Randall had his, too. He supposes he can accept it, though it makes him wish more than anything that he could crawl out of his skin.

Maybe into a hydraulic beast suit. Maybe into oblivion.

\--

Will tucks the photographs away into the folder and rises from his chair. He walks back out through the same doors, considering skeletons and blood spatter when he gets outside. The winter persevered while he was incarcerated. Feeling it now on his skin—imagining his biology to be different, imagining what an unfamiliar spinal cord would do to his anatomy if his body could survive the change—he imagines Randall Tier’s body rotting, not out of spite but because bodies decay when cells die.

He imagines Matthew Brown’s body, alive, beside Randall Tier’s decomposition, beside the bits of himself that continued into transformation. To his credit, Matthew did understand the nature and mind of his friend—friend? No, his lover. Definitely his lover, with the way his eyes roamed with familiar abandon; his devastation, palpable.

For a moment he imagines them alive as they were, before craving led them to destruction. He sees them bright-eyed and enamored for the surprise link they’d discovered between them, sees them sharing their stories, their memories, their internalizations and concepts and schema, and sees them sharing their bodies; sees them worshipping one another in very different ways, unique to their separate pathologies.

Matthew would worship. He would make it his mission to please, to make Randall forget his perceived deformity. Randall would bare all, too accustomed to exposure of that which he would obfuscate if only he could.

Will continues for the car, realizing with the blare of a car horn that he’d stopped in the middle of the street. He walks around the front and gets in on the passenger’s side. He tosses the file haphazardly into the spacious backseat, aiming so the photographs won’t spill onto the floor.

“Was this excursion worth the trip, Will, honestly?” Hannibal asks from the driver’s seat.

He hasn’t started the car and the cab has gone slightly chilly with the loss of heat. Will rubs his hands together.

“He’s so focused on Randall Tier’s death he didn’t even threaten to expose us,” Will answers mechanically, still shaking himself out of borrowed head spaces and imagined encounters that weren’t his right to take. “ _Honestly,_ I wouldn’t be surprised if he got himself killed in there. He’s spiraling.”

“What do you propose we do?”

“No one believed me when I pointed the finger at you,” Will tells him flatly. “What are his chances, do you think?”

Hannibal tuts at him and starts the car. He lets the engine idle to watch Will hold his hands to the vents.

“Do you regret that we did this to them?” he asks after a moment, and Will has to look at him to check that he heard the question right.

He starts to protest but reconsiders their amount of involvement. They did, effectively, send both Brown and Tier after each other as if they were nothing more than attack dogs. He doesn’t feel guilt. He feels complicity, yes—unpleasant for having enabled obsessions that were so like his own only to dismantle and obliterate them.

But regret?

“No.”

Hannibal turns a surprised look at Will. First it is tinged with incredulity. Second it meets the stain of poorly hidden desire.

Regret?

“No,” Hannibal reaffirms for both of them.

He gets them on the road without making Will ask. It’s a small thing, but welcome.

“What are you making for dinner tonight?”

“Do you ask because you would like to join me?”

“Just seems like the thing to do,” Will answers.

“I had thought perhaps I would try my hand at Korean tonight.”

Will looks at him as they pull onto the freeway. “Is that a euphemism?”

Hannibal smiles indulgently and shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the road. He says, “English would be a euphemism.”

Will turns to stare out the window as they drive, letting himself slip beneath a heavy veil. The flitting shapes of trees shift into animal bones; the buildings into balmy skulls into rounded shoulders. The rumble of the engine becomes the words he heard spoken in Tier’s voice when Jack called him back to look on what he’d done.

_This monument is not to me. It’s to you._

The blackened maw of Tier’s assembled form—his realized form—reflects that hunger and desire never slaked in Will; reflects an appetite only realized in the denial of dreams no longer the symptom of a fever not his doing.

It is his doing. It is his fault. Randall Tier is only the beginning.

Matthew will see someday if he doesn’t now. Randall _wasn’t_ a person. He _was_ the monument. He was the creation and the creative instinct itself. He was the whisper of vitality repressed for so long and seen as vile and ugly.

But ugly according to whom?

 _This is my becoming,_ that voice whispers.

Will wonders if it will ever leave him. People leave him, but memories, thoughts, sensations—even when they fade, he has them. He couldn’t let go of Randall if he tried, not if he wanted it with all of his being.

And he doesn’t want that, not even for the purpose of keeping up appearances.

Perhaps Matthew can’t understand. It will be better for him if that’s the case. Will wouldn’t wish what he is on his worst enemy.

Not that Hannibal needs the boost.

Not that Hannibal is his true enemy, not really.

_This is my becoming._

This is his haunting. A dark throne and a burnt palace, left alone with no one to speak to him but the ghosts of the ones he sacrificed. Only Randall feels real. Only Randall wanted to be put there.

_This is my becoming, and yours._

It hurts.

And what is pain for but producing a warning to the rest of the body? Is it for growth? Is it for the pleasure of endorphins?

“Will, we’re here.”

Life is never black and white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From “Naka-choko” (S2 E10): “The monument is not to me. It’s to you…This is my becoming, and yours.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics by Led Zeppelin
> 
> Poem by Paula Meehan
> 
> Abel Gideon in Bryan Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (S2 E6, Futamono): “The term sociopath hasn’t been used by any respected psychiatrist since 1968.”


End file.
